Re: Nautilus Undo

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Oct 26, 2007, at 1:58 PM, Amos Brocco wrote:
> Il giorno ven, 26/10/2007 alle 15.50 +0200, Alexander Larsson ha
> scritto:
> > If I copy a file over another file. How do you undo that?
> ...
> An improvement would consist in Moving to trash the existing file
> instead of deleting it, so that the following undo sequence would
> restore the original file: 1. Undo Copy (delete the copied items), 2.
> Undo move to trash (restore the replaced item from trash).

This is the behavior proposed in
<http://daringfireball.net/2003/03/i_love_it_because_its_trash>.

You would need to be careful to make this happen visually slowly -- 
make the icon for the copied item disappear, then restore the replaced 
item, then wait until at least 1000ms has passed since the icon for the 
copied item disappared, *then* display the icon for the replaced item. 
Otherwise, if the icons for the items were the same, it could look as 
if the undo hadn't happened at all.

> ...
> > And in general, is it a good idea to expose an undo system in the UI
> > when its gonna have so many cases like this when it doesn't work? 
> > Users might rely on it and then loose data when undo unexpectedly 
> > doesn't work.
>
> The best we can do is to inform the user what the undo really does or 
> doesn't (or can do or can't), and at least avoid that undo/redo 
> destroy data without the user knowing about it.
> ...

The developers of other applications have long assumed -- correctly, I 
think -- that an undo function that can't undo everything is better 
than no undo at all. When the most recent action can't be undone, the 
Undo item typically reads "Can’t Undo Name-of-Action" as well as being 
disabled.

BTW, Amos, thanks for working on this!

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