Re: The Future of Nautilus: Show the filesystem

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik nnaji gmail com>]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 18:25, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:

On Thu, 2010-06-24 at 16:48 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-06-24 at 14:04 +0100, Allan Day wrote:
> > > I don't think people, even technical should have to modify the default
> > > UI just to be able to do things they need doing. A setting like this is
> > > clearly not a "preference", its not about if you prefer it or not. Its
> > > something you need to use (or not), so hiding it as a preference is imho
> > > a bad idea.
> >
> > We already have a precedent for this with hidden files. They are
> > required for many tasks.
>
> Not that many, and additionally "View->show hidden files" is a lot more
> visible than a magic preference in some tab in the preference dialog.
> Its a regular, always visible menu item, and just scanning the menu
> items in the main menu will let you find this.

So a file system menu item is one possible approach. Or what about a
'Show hidden devices' menu item?

while attempts to hide stuff and make the surface simpler all over the place are becoming a trend regardless of the fact that it breaks stuff, let's be smart for once.

Nautilus is moving towards a great future, don't oversize the steps, or you will sink the ship before it is time to sail.

while Tracker and Zeitgeist are making progress, their integration into Nautilus is a must-have, before we can talk about hiding the old way of doing things.
"Places" as a concept doesn't work yet in its current implementation.
Let's all be real about this, the ideas are there, the functionality isnt.

Keep the filesystem exposed, better use hiding and symlinks, especially icons and symbols, folder thumbnailing etc to improve what's exposed to the user, add some intelligent ideas to the "Places" concept, instead of taking away features from the UI's face, which most of us really do need until the dream of a truely flat filesystem becomes real.

As long as searching the filesystem for content is not fuzzy, i suggest wait with making navigation through the hierarchical FS more difficult.