Nautilus sidebar width and more

[Stefano Teso <stefano teso gmail com>]

Hi,

I'm Stefano Teso, a regular GNOME user: I have been using Nautilus for
quite some time, and having fun with it; now I'm quite interested in
contributing patches and trying to fix bugs, altought I'm a newbie to
GTK+ and UI coding.

I've posted two wannabe patches to bugzilla [1],[2]; I'm pretty sure
they won't be accepted, but I'm highly interested getting those two
reviewed.

At this point I'm mainly interested in understanding some UI design
points:

  * Why is the sidebar completely resizable -- why does it allow for
smaller than reasonable sidebar sizes? This for instance triggers bug
[3]. (Perhaps an eel bug?)

  * Would there be any objections in switching from a ToggleButton to a
ComboBox implementation for the side panels selection menu in
nautilus-side-pane.c?

The combobox implementation adds support for scrolling with the mouse
wheel natively; the menu doesn't have to be managed directly in
Nautilus; the menu width isn't hardwired and depends on the combo box
width; it is more consistent with GNOME UIs in general. On the other
hand, combo boxes don't have a ReliefStyle property so they can't be
``flattened''. I wrote a partially-working-to-total-bogus patch for
this, I'll try to get the reviewed to, if only for feedback.

  * I'm primarily interested in catching a selection changed signal from
within nautilus_window_info_report_selection_changed () to update the
information sidebar contents accordingly. The problem I'm having is that
of accessing the information sidebar when I only have a NautilusWindow
at hand... Would this need complex code refactoring? If so, do you have
any advice about it?

As you can see I'm not interested in any major issues at the moment -- I
don't have the knowledge to work on crasher bugs et al.

Sorry for the verbosity, and/or if any/all of this is OT, and thanks in
advance.

----
Stefano

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=415206
[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=415695
[3] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357880
[4]