nautilus-next, "selection mode" initial patch

[Emmanuel Touzery <etouzery gmail com>]

Hello,

 I was quite excited by Allan Day's post "nautilus next", and especially the idea that nautilus might finally be single click by default.

 However since it seems no work is going on on the matter almost one year later, I decided to play with the idea.

 I've implemented the _absolute_ _mininum_ to play with the idea. I would like to know if there is interest, and if the code is acceptable, or if it's not the right time/the right way and so on.

 What I did: the changes should only affect the single-click mode. The double-click mode should stay as-is.

 A new toggle button "selection mode" (tickmark) is next to the search icon (I should hide it in double-click mode, didn't get around to doing it). If you activate it, in the existing list view and grid view you get checkboxes and you can select the items (shift-click to select a range of items also works). If you use the keyboard, you can use the arrows and enter to select (in the list view mode, sometimes there is the little dotted rectangle on items and you can see where is the focus, sometimes not... not sure what to do about it).

 When you toggle between selection mode and normal operation, the selection is reset. There is no selection concept if you're not in selection mode (except if you right-click the current file is selected, but you shouldn't be able to select several files). In selection mode, you select, outside of selection mode you activate (open folders or files). There is no more rubberbanding.

 Features left to add as a minimum:

* confirm whether it's really OK to ditch the current single-click mode

* hide the selection mode toggle when operating in double-click mode

* in keyboard mode, the selected item is sometimes not indicated in the list view (I think I'd need help with that one)

* display the action bar at the bottom when items get selected, as in the design (new folder with selection..., move to... copy to...) => display it only in single-click+selection mode presumably

* in selection mode change the header bar more, so that we have the options "select all", "select none", "cancel", like in gnome-clocks

* with the new "selection icon" the window starts to get busy (many icons). the design plans to move the grid/list mode icons in a popover menu that would replace the current in-window menu. That would remove both icons and make the window less busy.

* change the default to single click??

Here's the patch that I made:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22600720/nautilus-single-click.diff

I'm working on this on github:
https://github.com/emmanueltouzery/nautilus

Emmanuel