Re: [PATCH] Add Pathbar to Nautilus Browser

[Matthew Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

Alexander Larsson wrote:
>...
> First a bit on the general UI. I don't want to have the pathbar in
> addition to the location bar, I want it to replace the location bar. For
> a long time a major goal of nautilus has been to avoid displaying
> pathnames (as in absolute pathnames or uris) in the UI. Going from
> location bar will help with this. It will also help us look less like a
> web browser, which is nice, as that can confuse people at times.
>...

How about using the hierarchy menu instead of the pathbar?

First, Nautilus already has the hierarchy menu in spatial mode, so if
you're going to provide a clickable hierarchy list in browser mode too,
it would make sense for it to be the same sort of clickable hierarchy list.

Second, the hierarchy menu is more compact than the pathbar would be, so
it could be placed in the main toolbar instead of taking up a toolbar of
its own.

Third, because items are wider than they are high, the hierarchy menu is
much less likely than the pathbar to need scrolling to see the item you
want, making it faster to use if you're navigating more than about four
or five levels up or down (and if you're navigating only one or two
levels up or down, you'd probably use Back or Forward instead of the
pathbar anyway). This speed difference would be even more obvious if the
hierarchy menu was fixed to work with a single drag, instead of
requiring two clicks.

>...
> Why did you add folder icons to normal folders? That seems to use a lot
> of space for something that isn't really needed.
>...

And fourth, because space consumption isn't an issue, the hierarchy menu
can have the visual consistency of using an icon for every item. :-) It
also doesn't suffer from the number of visible items varying
non-obviously depending on the width of their names.

For these reasons, I'd be much happier if the hierarchy menu was copied
from Nautilus to the file dialogs, than if the pathbar was copied from
the file dialogs to Nautilus. (Possibly I'm biased because I frequently
work in a deep folder hierarchy, for which the pathbar is awful.)

-- 
Matthew Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/