Re: [PATCH] Add tree functionality to list view

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 11:22 +0200, Juerg Billeter wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I've created a draft implementation of a tree view[1], as I thought it's
> easier to decide whether it's useful if there is a working
> implementation to play with.
> 
> I've added auto-expand for dnd which works with the sidebar tree view,
> too. This patch may solve some of the problems some users have with
> spatial nautilus.
> 
> There are probably still some rough edges needing cleanup but it doesn't
> work too bad so far. Besides that, expansion state saving and loading
> have yet to be added for spatial windows.
> 
> Any comments?

Wow. Pretty cool.

This was actually much easier than I expected. I expected that there
would be much more places where we relied on the fact that
(historically) a FMDirectoryView only shows one particular folder. This
change violates that, which requires us to review all the Nautilus code
looking for places that make such assumption. However, things already
work suprisingly well, so this might not be that hard.

I need to look into this much more, but here are some immediate comments
on the patch.

Its not very stable. I got several crashes just playing around with it.

Handling of empty folders is very strange. Its flickers a lot when the
empty folder gets opened and then closed. Very disconcerting. Need to
work on this.

In the short time i looked i could only find one operation that broke
due to the multiple directories change. If I select two files in
different subdirs and then use "Duplicate" I got an error.

DnD copy/move and copy/paste semantics needs to be changed a bit for
this view to work. If I select a folder and a file in the folder and
copy that to another folder, currently both the folder and the file is
placed in the other folder as toplevel items. You likely wanted the file
to still be in its original folder. Say you for instance expand one
folder, select all and then drag this to some folder, would you expect
the files in the expanded folder to move out of its enclosing folder?
The exact semantics you want here needs to be figured out.

Anyway, cool work. I'll keep looking at the patch some more.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
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