Re: compact view removed from Nautilus

[Adam Dingle <adam yorba org>]

On 07/02/2012 01:18 PM, Allan Day wrote:
> Hey Adam,
>
> Thanks for your responses. Comments inline...
>
> Adam Dingle <adam yorba org> wrote:
> > > * Horizontal scrolling is unergonomic with mouse and touchpad input
> > It's true that the mouse scroll wheel moves vertically and compact view
> > scrolls horizontally, but that takes only a moment to get used to.  I see no
> > reason why scrolling on a touchpad would be any more natural vertically than
> > horizontally.
> The problem is the way fingers and wrists work. :) The human hand is
> not well suited to horizontal movement with a mouse/touchpad (unless
> you're using a scroll wheel).

That's not obvious to me.  We already move our mice left and right all 
day long without much apparent effort.  And even if one direction were 
easier than the other, it's not clear to me that the difference would be 
significant enough to affect a design design like this.

> > > * It is hard to scan multiple columns when they scroll, and it is difficult
> > > to find a particular item in an alphabetical list if it wraps over multiple
> > > columns
> > Actually I think it's much easier to scan for a particular filename in
> > compact view, where all filenames in a column are physically and
> > alphabetically contiguous, than in icon view, where there are gaps between
> > the filenames and where filenames in a vertical column are not contiguous
> > alphabetically.
> Well sure, it's easier than icon view, but it's not as easy as list
> view. Icon view is for when you're interested in icons/thumbnails,
> list view is for when you're focused on filenames.

But list view just isn't that useful when you have dozens of files in a 
single directory, a very common case.  My screen is 2-dimensional.  If 
I'm looking at a large set of files, I certainly want them to be laid 
out in two dimensions rather than having to scroll to see them.  In this 
situation, compact view would be my first choice, followed by icon view; 
list view would come last.

I think it's worth looking at what other file managers offer here.

- Konqueror, Thunar and Windows Explorer all offer a view similar to 
Nautilus's compact view: filenames appear vertically stacked, are sorted 
from top to bottom and the view scrolls horizontally. Columns have 
variable width.

- In the Mac OS Finder, when you choose to display filenames beside 
icons, the sorting order changes to be like Nautilus's compact view, 
i.e. sorted from top to bottom in each column.  Once again, scrolling is 
horizontal.  Columns have fixed (user-adjustable) width.  Filenames wrap 
to a second line if necessary to fit in the column width, and are 
ellipsized if they won't fit in two lines.

> ...
>
> > > The other reason why I think it is good to remove compact view is that it
> > > is inelegant as a solution to users' needs. List and icon view have clear
> > > roles and are easy to communicate to users. Grid view prioritises visual
> > > representation of files. List view focuses on finding my name. With these
> > > two options we offer a clear and straigh tforward choice.
> > >
> > > Compact view doesn't fit neatly into our existing functionality. It
> > > overlaps with the list view (since it focuses on finding by name), yet it
> > > misses some of its advantages (such as the ability to easily reorder the
> > > list). It also overlaps with zoom, which is the standard way to display more
> > > items at once.
> > To me, the compact view is essential because it's our only view which
> > displays files in a layout where filenames have significantly greater
> > density than icons.  This is important in the (extremely common) case where
> > you're looking at a large number of files in a directory and care more about
> > the names than about the icons.  List view is inappropriate for this use
> > case because it shows too much detail about each file.  To put it simply,
> > compact view is like 'ls' and list view is like 'ls -l'.
> I think there are a lot of ways that list view can be improved to fit
> these requirements. Jon has already gone some way towards making the
> noise level lower by sanitising the date formats. Another thing we can
> do is (which I think he's going to look at) is improve zooming so that
> you can have the icons become less significant in comparison to the
> text.
>
> In general, I much prefer this approach of concentrating on one or two
> views and putting effort into making them work really well. And if
> we're improving the defaults, then the maximum number of users benefit
> from that work.

If your goal is truly to have only two views, then I think you should 
add back the option to have filenames beside icons in the icon view, and 
display the existing compact view (with vertical sorting and horizontal 
scrolling) whenever the user chooses to see filenames beside icons.  I 
think that would work fine.

If the compact view does not return in some form, then we will be the 
only one among the major file managers listed above which does not offer 
a view like this.  I think that will make it harder to browse 
directories with dozens of files on Nautilus than in any of these other 
programs.

adam