Re: Deactivating the Trash

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 11:46 +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:
> ...
> We should really have 4 deletion/trash operation modes:
> 
> I none
> II trash only
> III delete only
> IV trash/delete
> 
> only II and IV can be achieved with the current prefs, where II is the
> default and IV is used if /apps/nautilus/preferences/enable_delete is
> set.
> ...

The idea behind the Trash is that every so often you'll throw out
something by mistake and want to get it back. So the Trash is a
container for things that you *probably* don't want any more.

As a general rule, the longer something has been in the Trash, the
greater the probability that you don't want it any more. The Trash in
Mac OS, and the Recycle Bin in Windows, have never understood this: when
you empty either of them, stuff you threw out 30 seconds ago (maybe
accidentally) gets deleted along with stuff you threw out two months
ago. To make matters worse, you have to empty the Trash manually! We're
supposed to have computers to do menial jobs like that.

So perhaps this could be automated with a single option:

        Automatically delete items from the Trash:
        [ Never            :^]

The menu could contain "Never", "After 1 year", "After 3 months", "After
1 month", "After 1 week", "After 1 day", "When I log out", and
"Immediately". The last option would satisfy Nikolaus's use case.

This option could replace the "Include a Delete command that bypasses
Trash" option, so the number of preferences would stay the same.

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