Re: more thoughts on compact view

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

On Thu, 2012-07-19 at 16:16 -0004, Adam Dingle wrote:
> In list view, about 23 items fit comfortably vertically in a window on
> my laptop, which is why I needed to scroll in all of the above cases.
> The scrolling slows me down: it effectively doubles the number of
> steps needed to perform the tasks above.  In compact view I can see
> about 3 times as many items, and so in that view I wouldn't have
> needed to scroll at all here.  I suppose I could have typed the
> beginning of the filename I wanted in each case, but that requires
> more thought and effort - I'd rather just point at something I can see
> and click it.  In this example, typing the name of the source tarball
> would be especially awkward - I'd need to type 11 characters
> ("vala-0.17.3") to jump to the tarball (whose full name is
> "vala-0.17.3.tar.xz"), since I had subdirectories in the same
> directory whose names begin with the same initial 10 characters (e.g.
> "vala-0.17.2").

I would probably combine typing and cursor keys here. Typing the first
few letters (e.g., 'vala') and then navigating to the right version
using cursor keys works very well in my experience. In contrast to other
type-ahead implementations it's possible to navigate among
non-sequential items as in your case with folders and regular files.

> This example may seem mundane, but that's sort of the point - I do
> file browsing like this all the time.  On the aesthetic front, I also
> find it distracting to see all the extra information displayed in list
> view - most of the time I just don't care how large files are or when
> they were last modified.  I just want to navigate to where I want to
> go.

The compact view appears to be more efficient and a better fit when
working visually with the mouse. The question is whether it's needed in
addition to the other efficient option which is to use the keyboard.

I don't think that the compact view is the most essential view of a file
manager but I can definitely see that it can be useful and Nautilus 3.5
doesn't offer a direct replacement. If it were up to me, I'd probably
have kept the compact view, however, I understand that there are happy
and unhappy users for almost every maintainer decision.

As Nautilus is not a new application in the experimental stage, I would
definitely appreciate more explanations for such major changes in the
commit messages and/or bug reports, though. The main argument in the
commit message for removing compact mode is meaningless given that 'text
besides icons' mode has been removed as well.

Jürg