Re: Singe click selection with checkboxes

[Kristoffer Lundén <kristoffer lunden gmail com>]

Hello again!

On 9/4/05, Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org> wrote:
> My impression is that
> multiple incoherent selections (first, fourth, 20. item) are rare enough
> to rectify a modifier.

Huh? Ever worked with photos/images? Documents? Anything? 

"Let's see, I want that one, that one, those two, and oh, that one."
"The customer wants to see the budget, the estimates, the general
outline and the task list."
"Which photos to send to my mom from the vacation... that one, those
three, oh not that one, but those two perhaps."

It would seem to me that this is at the very heart of file management,
indeed of most things that is organised in "lists".

In some cases, selections can be done more easily on some kind of
criteria, like pattern selection (a great feature) or by sorting on
type, size or similar. Surprisingly often though, that's not what you
are after.

I'm aware that in many cases, such as "what photos to pick" it could
be solved by dragging an image at the time, but that is one of the
major things I really want to avoid. I've no cravings for carpal
tunnels, thank you very much. ;-)

Also, dragging stuff like that might need keyboard modifiers to do the
right thing, depending on what you are doing. For instance, dragging
within the same partition defaults to moving, which is a good
default... unless you really just wanted to collect a few
images/documents to send *copies* of.

Being able to pick and choose easily, and then just do something with
that choice, now that would be excellent. And what I'm after here.

> Thanks for your productive input by the way, and sorry for disappointing
> you - but I think the way you use Nautilus is not shared by many other
> users. 

Then it would seem they aren't using their file manager much. ;-) I
am. Thanks for listening and answering though, sometimes (often?)
things you think up that would "be so cool and great", really aren't
when it comes to actual usage. =) I don't think we really have reached
any agreement yet in this case, but we are probably getting there.

> I'm sure that we can come up with something better - maybe other
> special click regions that don't clutter the UI. 

Fine by me. The check boxes as indicator was, like I said, optional,
however they are an universal symbol for multiple selections, so I
used them as a possible example.

> We could for instance
> use the label in icon view exclusively for selection toggling and clicks
> outside the text or icon region inside the name row could be used to
> toggle the selection of the toggled, although the GtkTreeView IMHO
> doesn't allow the latter as of writing.

Also fine by me. I think it's not very intuitive by default, but easy
to learn once told about it, and simple to use. All I want is easy,
multiple, possibly non-sequential selections. =)

> > I don't think this is about activation. But what I do all the time is
> > that I sort, I move, I copy, I delete, I edit, I queue and so on -
> > just what a file manager is for - and I do it with multiple files,
> > because often you want to do this with multiple files.
> 
> I think Alex at/after GUADEC planned a shelf-based copy/move system.
> It could be that it allows you to drag multiple files to a dedicated
> area on screen and then operate on all of these files at once.
> Alex, maybe you could elaborate on it?
> 

That could also be very useful, for files not in the same folder. Not
really for copy/move though? Otherwise, it'd be preferable to be able
to just operate directly on a selection, at least for simple tasks.
Not that the two couldn't cooperate.


Regards,

-- 
Kristoffer Lundén
☎ 0704 48 98 77
✉ kristoffer lunden gmail com
ICQ: 618 289 83
http://www.gamemaker.nu/