Re: "Open With" application list not sorted

[Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org>]

Dear James,

Am Freitag, den 13.06.2008, 13:52 +0000 schrieb James Johnston:

> 1.      When I right-click a file in Nautilus and select “Open With”,
> the list of applications is not sorted.  This is quite annoying as
> there is a long list of applications.  Is this by design or a bug?

Applications that are associated with a MIME type that pretty much match
the MIME type of the file are preferred over generic ones.

For instance, if you have an XML-derived bookmark format, the idea is to
display all bookmark applications first, next all XML editors and at the
end generic text editors.

In what specific situation does this break?

> 2.      Also, when I start typing to search for an application in the
> list, it would be nice if my typing acted as a filter instead of just
> scrolling to the text.  E.g. currently if I type “spreadsheet” this
> yields nothing.  It would be nice if all other choices were eliminated
> and “OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet” was the only remaining choice.  I
> feel this would greatly expand the usability when trying to find
> something in a long list of applications.
> 
>  
> 
> Between the behavior of #1 and the not-implemented status of #2, it makes finding something to open with very difficult.

I agree that a dynamic search where the result list is updated is way
more intuitive. Feel free to come up with a patch, I would definitly
integrate it.


Sidenote A: The launcher selector of the "Add to Panel" dialog also
does filtering, and I think that in general, live filtering is
preferable over live selection.

Maybe a usability expert should figure out whether the directory search
in Nautilus or in the file chooser would be more intuitive with live
filtering.


Sidenote B: You should not have to use this dialog, really. I guess some
MIME associations are not installed. Please report these bugs so that
distributors and application authors can fix their applications.


best regards,
 Christian Neumair

-- 
Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org>