Re: [PATCH] Add Pathbar to Nautilus Browser

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2005-07-07 at 15:45 +1200, Matthew Thomas wrote:
> 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.

The menu has a distinct disadvantage of not actually telling you where
in the filesystem you are. I think this is very important for the
browser when you navigate through the filesystem, and we can't replace
the location entry with something that doesn't.

And browser mode is mostly used with a larger window than spatial mode,
so the requirements for space consumtions are quite different.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an oversexed umbrella-wielding farmboy with a passion for fast cars. 
She's a plucky junkie bodyguard in the wrong place at the wrong time. They 
fight crime!