Steps View - Miller Column View/Mode For Nautilus

[Brian Crockford <dosperm gmail com>]

I've been investigating the options available for OPENSTEP style
columns view file browsers, and I've decided I don't like what's out
there. I may sound like I'm nitpicking - which I am - but Dolphin's
KDE (which is jarring in GNOME), Gworkspace is GNUstep (which is even
worse at playing nicely with others), and the brief Thunar patch
proposal didn't emerge.

As such, I'm planning to implement it in Nautilus instead - for my own
purposes, at least. However, since there's a Brainstorm idea[1] open
for it, I wondered whether others were interested in the concept. Any
input as to how best to implement it (ie.: mode vs. view, resizeable
columns vs. global fixed size, preview panel vs. not, etc.).

On the other hand, taking recent discussions about a split view into
account, I realize that this may seem to branch from Nautilus'
intended purpose as a graphical shell. Obviously I think it would be a
great addition, though; it nicely extends on the breadcrumb bar idea
as a graphical way to display directory hierarchy. It works well for
browsing multimedia directories especially.

[1] http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/4496/

Brian