Re: Feedback: Six Nautilus annoyances

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 04:34, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:
> 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 :-)

I'm not sure what you mean. The script assumes its run with current
working directory being /home/eugenia/blah-blah, but nautilus launches
it with cwd $home? Then the script would be broken from the shell too,
if you launched it using an absolute pathname, or if it was in your
path.

The reason we use $home as cwd when launching things is that that makes
it the default saving location for most app fileselectors. It also makes
relative pathname files written by the app (including core files) end up
in $home (instead of /usr/bin where it would otherwise end up for most
apps).

> 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*.

You don't actually need to reload the window to make the paste menu
work, selecting a file is enough. But it is rather lame, yes.

The underlying reason for this is a problem with X11. There is no way to
get told when the owner of a selection changes, so we can't update the
sensitivity of the paste menu. The fix for this is in the XFIXES X
extension, but that hasn't ended up in a widely distributed Xserver yet.
I added some code to cvs that makes it notice changes from inside
nautilus, so the basic cut/paste cycle in nautilus should work better
now. It can still be confused if other X clients modify the clipboard
though. 

> 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.

The exact behaviour of scripts need to be though about some more.
Directory merging always creates problems and complexities, so I'm not
sure we want that. I'm not even sure we want to expose scripts as-is in
a way that everyone is forced to see them.

> 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)

We are aware of the fact that the mime ui is bad. Unfortunately we
didn't have time to do much about it for Gnome 2.6. 

> 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.

Perhaps we should have a separate preference for normal images. Thats
even possible to set up already using gconf-editor. However I disagree
about adding the thumbnail size prefs. If our photo managers suck we
should work on fixing them instead of adding some of photo manager ui to
the file manager.

However, this all has to wait until next version. We're in hard UI
freeze.

> 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

As someone said, this is already possible. Although the UI isn't that
great. A great UI that allows both of these isn't that easy to come up
with though, and we are tossing around some different ideas about folder
backgrounds.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an underprivileged playboy paranormal investigator from a doomed world. 
She's a pregnant wisecracking doctor with the power to bend men's minds. They 
fight crime!