places and history sidebar integration



Hi,

lately I've been thinking that the history sidebar is less useful than
it could be if it was integrated in the places sidebar. So, is there any
plan to work on it?

I've read somewhere that Alex Graveley (IIRC) proposed (perhaps in a GTK
discussion?) to make history bookmarks ``pinnable'', just like Tomboy
notes, so that a history bookmark could be `promoted' to a places
bookmark just by pinning it. I like the idea.

IMHO there's an easy way to do this. The attached mokup illustrates the
idea. (Please ignore the expanders' text -- lazily ripped from a gaim
screenshot -- and the ugly repainted color.) You can see that hardwired
places (filesystem, home, etc.) are shown at the top; places bookmarks
are there right below, placed in an expander; a second expander shows
history bookmarks.

To `pin' an item you would drag a history entry to the places area: it
would automatically become a places entry, placed wherever in the
treeview you dropped it (allowing for immediate manual sorting,
contrarily to simple pinning, that would require to pin the item and
*then* sort it). Also, if you drag a places entry in the history area,
it is attached to the history as the last visited element.

What I like about this system is that there are no `pin' icons in the
sidebar :-) (they are strong visual clutter IMHO, and pretty ugly too),
plus it's pretty easy to implement leaving the code almost untouched.
Expanders are there so that if you want to use this new `places+history
sidebar' as a normal places sidebar, you can just close the history area
expander; and similarly if you want to use it as a normal history
sidebar. Unfortunately the two expandes eat up some horizontal space,
and (in the mockup!) they aren't very recognizable from the other
treeview entries.

Please note that merging the history and places sidebars also improves
the situation with the history sidebar (it's not up to date, especially
in regard to the recent addition af an "Open in New Window..." entry to
the dropdown menu in the places sidebar; theorically, the history
sidebar should implement the same functionality -- for consistency.) and
cuts down the amount of code to manage.

I made a *very rough* patch that accomplishes this result (no expanders
there yet, though). One conceptual problem is: how many history items
should be shown to the user? I've defined a maximum number of N=8, but
this isn't very flexible.

If the idea is not being worked on by anyone else and I receive some
kind of positive feedback (or at least no negative feedback ;-) ), I'd
love to work on it myself. Any idea/comment welcome.

Thanks,

----
Stefano

P.S. Where could I find plans/a roadmap of sorts for Nautilus 2.20 and
beyond? I'd rellay love to know what developers are working on at the
moment.

Attachment: nautilus-history%2Bplaces-mockup.jpeg
Description: JPEG image



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