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

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2009-02-26 at 17:37 -0500, Brian Crockford wrote:
> > 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.

I don't think that is right. A new mode is something very basic in the
user mental model of the app. Its not something you add to get a better
alignment for some widgets.

> 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.

I don't think removing it is a good idea either. The pathbar shows the
full location, whereas the column view is based on some directory that
may not be the toplevel folder. Its also how you know the directory
names you're in, the ctrl-l quick go-to entry, etc. 

> 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.

I agree that the switiching view type when entering a subdirectory in
column view is bad. But I don't think not doing this is really
inconsistent. In fact, we already more or less do the same in the list
view when you expand subdirectories. The way to see it imho is that the
column view is a view of a whole subtree, starting in the viewed
directory (much like the list view) and that navigating into a (direct)
subdirectory isn't really moving away from the view.