Re: Steps View - Miller Column View/Mode For Nautilus

[Brian Crockford <dosperm gmail com>]

> There has been people who expressed an interest in working on this
> before though, unless i missremember. So you might want to start by
> searching the mailing list for this. Maybe there was even some code you
> could get ideas from.

You didn't misremember at all, so thank you! There was apparently some
discussion about it at the end of 2006, and even earlier in 2003 (and
some more stuff in 2002, and probably before). The latter didn't
produce anything, that I read, but the former may have.

It seems Mark Kegel did a lot of work writing a widget which
implements this kind of structure - he almost made it to a working
demo. I'm going to try to track him down, as well as a couple others
that were involved in the discussion. If any of those people are still
tuned in to the mailing list, I'd love to know if their discussions
ever turned into code (or design specs).

I'm not entirely convinced that the best way to implement this is as a
new view, however, and some of the previous discussion helped
highlight that. I'm leaning towards a new mode. Unfortunately that's
even less trivial to implement than the already non-trivial view.

For example, the breadcrumb navigation works well with the idea, but
not in its current form; the staggered sizing would clash visually
with the columns, since each "crumb" wouldn't match up to its column.
In a new mode I would probably remove the bar altogether, which I
obviously wouldn't do for a new view.

Also, as Dolphin's implementation highlights, the concept doesn't work
well when each folder remembers its own view. It's very jarring when -
if you don't change the normal configuration - you switch from an icon
view folder to a column view folder, or back. Nautilus performs the
same memory operations, normally; I think they would really have to be
disabled when the view was active. It would make the view more
consistent, but I'm reluctant to change people's settings like that.

Whatever the case, I'm mulling around the options and I'm going to
have a solid specification going before I start serious
implementation. Input is very welcome and appreciated!

Brian