Re: Click to rename...

["Gene Z. Ragan" <diskzero mac com>]

On Thursday, November 30, 2006, at 03:18AM, "Alexander Larsson" <alexl redhat com> wrote:
>On Wed, 2006-11-29 at 14:09 -0800, Gene Ragan wrote:
>> I was surprised to find that Nautilus doesn't support click to rename, and that both the space key
>> and return/enter open up the container.  Thoughts on this?  It took a while to fine tune this on Finder,
>> but it works pretty well with few accidental edit sessions.
>
>Its an old UI decision that dates back to the time of eazel, or at least
>darin. The general idea is that its very easy to accidentally rename
>something when clicking around, and that is a data-loss because you
>might not know that you renamed something or at least not know the
>previous name.

OK. I remember the discussion now.  John and Darin talked about this quite 
a bit.  I seem to recall that either hitting space or enter was the compromise
that would enter edit mode.  I see that both of these keys now open the container,
so either that feature had a short life and was removed, or was never checked in.

>
>I guess click to rename is more important on macs since they have only
>one mouse button by default, so context menus are less commonly used.
>

Yes, the context menu is nice, although I find it somewhat tiresome to have to right click,
locate the rename command, move the mouse and select the menu item in order to rename.
I think the click feature could be done right.  I can't think of one bug we had against Finder
against the click to rename feature involving data loss, or even one bug about general usability.
Now that I have said this, I am sure I will get hit be a deluge of bugs about it.

Gene