Feedback: Six Nautilus annoyances

["Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>]

Hi,
I would like to report six annoyances with Nautilus that I would love to see
them fixed for 2.6.

1. I can't run shell scripts that they load executables with relative paths.
As you can see in my shot:
http://www.osnews.com/img/5922/shells.png
I have this (correct and tested) shell script, but because it loads the
stuff as ./, Nautilus doesn't load the application inside ("trackballs" in
this case) even after I click "Run" from the "Run or Display" dialog, or
from a launcher. Running the shell script from an xterm works great.
If you modify the script to load everything as /home/eugenia/blah-blah, it
loads it, but if you give it a ./blah-blah, Nautilus won't understand what
directory the shell script  is in and so it will launch that script from the
home ~ position and not from the position the shell script lives in and so
nothing loads (I hope I am making some sense :-)

2. Almost all of the times, when I have two Nautilus windows open and I
right click on a file on the first window and tell it to "Copy", and then I
go to the other window to tell it to Paste it via the context menu, the
Paste option is greyed out. I have to *reload* the second nautilus window in
order to let it know that an item is ready for pasting. I find this behavior
very weak for a file manager, because cut/copy/paste is what it supposed to
be doing *well*.

3. Please provide a way to have Scripts on /usr/share/somewhere, so more
users in the system can try out scripts automatically. The Dropline Gnome
distribution wanted to do that, but they didn't find a way for Nautilus to
recognize any other location for scripts other than in the ~ so they shipped
with none.

4. Editing/creating/managing MIME types & their exec/view apps is currently
a real mess on 2.4.x. It blows my mind everytime I need to add an app or
modify an app for a given filetype. I hope an elegant solution is at hand on
2.6. Have a look at the BeOS way if that helps: its GUI is really intuitive
for this kind of thing. (I can provide screenshots if you need any samples
or ideas, just let me know)

5. Please provide a fifth option on the last tab of
nautilus-file-management-properties to let the user decide if they want
their image files to be previewed or not. Currently, images bind together
with the HTML/movie and other files, and in my opinion, the Image previews
should have their own drop down option because they are very "common" on the
average user's file system. So, please leave the HTML/movie files together
with the "other previewable files", but provide its own option for Images.
Especially for images, it would be best if we also get the option to decide
how big we want the thumbnail to be (up to 128pix) and this option should be
set on folder-by-folder case. This way, I could do what I can do with OSX's
new Finder or Explorer. Use the file manager as my image viewer for my 3,000
digital photos that I store. Especially because all image collector apps on
Linux suck (none is as powerful as iViewMediaPro  -- I am not talking about
iPhoto/gThumb/kinkatta kind of home apps), so I would like the file manager
itself to be able to handle simple actions like variable image size per
folder. A file manager is not an image viewer, and Nautilus is definately
not a Konqueror monster, but what I am asking I believe is within the scope
of a modern file *manager* without making things complicated or adding truly
uneeded options.

6. Please provide a checkbox/knob to make Nautilus remember the background
images or colors on folder case by case. I would like my home ~ to have a
nice girlie background image with fade pink hearts, but I don't want my
/usr/local/bin to be the same. ;-D

And that was my feedback for the day. :)

thank you,
Eugenia