Experience report / Search

[Lars Noschinski <lars public noschinski de>]

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Dear developers,

a few weeks ago, I switched from GNOME 3.4 to GNOME 3.8 (on Debian
testing) and I wanted to describe my experiences, as I haven't been
able to get entirely comfortable with the new Nautilus. I have also
tried Nautilus 3.10 on anOpenSUSE live CD to see whether the issues I
describe are still present in newer versions (I haven't been able to
test 3.12, because on GNOME 3.12 live cd, Nautilus crashes as soon as
I try to search).

Most of the time, I know pretty well where to find the file(s) I am
looking for. In the past, I mostly used type-ahead for this; combined
with the location bar (Ctrl+L -- is there a way discover this bar
without knowing it is there?) when jumping into a totally differing
part of my directory hierarchy.

With type-ahead gone, I tried to find alternate ways of navigating,
but have only been partially successful -- if you have suggestions, I
am glad to here them. I have been mostly using the location bar for
now. The disadvantage is that this only helps if I know an unique
prefix of the directory name (otherwise i get no completion and no
suggestions to continue).

May biggest problem with the search is the slowness with a large
number of results: For example, I have a directory named "P" in my
home. If I now press "P" in my home, Nautilus pretty fast displays a
number of results including this directory. But I have almost no
chance to select this folder (just pressing "Return" for the first
result would be nice, btw), as Nautilus starts listing the other
300000 files (according to "find -iname '*p*' | wc -l") containing a
"p". Nautilus becomes unresponsive; sometimes I am able to cancel the
operation, sometimes the system offers to kill Nautilus. I feel that
Nautilus should be able to protect itself from a number of results it
cannot handle.

This is particularly annoying because the behaviour can be triggered
by just typing too slow or by opening the filter dialog (i.e.,
filtering for filetype) without typing in any name.

That being said, I think I like the idea of search just narrowing down
the displayed files. In its current state, the removal of type-ahead
is a definite step backwards for me, However, I can imagine a few
things so I would not miss it in the future:

  * Type-ahead like behaviour could be integrated in the location bar:
    Typing in a directory relative to the current directory could move
    the selection to the first file matching the prefix. To make this
    useful, it should be possible to also enter/start files from the
    location bar (much like in a web browser)

  * Similar to search, have a "filter" feature: This would restrict the
    list of displayed files to those matching the search string (this
    would mostly be like a non-recursive search, except maybe when tree
    mode is enabled and some trees are expanded). One could imagine a
    "recursive" check-box switching between these modes. Just entering
    some string would enter the non-recursive mode by default, while
    Ctrl+F/the search icon would enter recursive mode.

While I am at it, there is some minor issue I have (although I'm not
sure whether they are new):

Instead of the classic status bar, there is now a status overlay,
displaying some information about the currently selected file(s). In
particular in list mode, this will(partially) obscur the name/details
of the last entry, if the directory is large enough to require
scrolling. I can only see this information then by chasing the overlay
away with the mouse.

Best regards,
  Lars
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