RE: [Usability]file selection dialogs - curious about presence of "." directory

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2003, Krzysztof Foltman wrote:

> Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 12:24:56 +0200
> From: Krzysztof Foltman <kfoltman onet pl>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: RE: [Usability]file selection dialogs - curious about presence
>     of "." directory
>
> > A directory in UNIX does actually contain a "." entry, which points
> > to it's own inode.
>
> Well, so does its counterpart in DOS/Windows (except root directory).

Windows 98 has a Refresh button and an Up button which serve the same
purpose.

I dont think leaving some sort of ".." in the dialog is such a terrible
idea, but if I were going to I would be inclined to put in an arrow and
some words after to give the feeling of a larger target to hit and make it
obvious to new users what the ".."  represents, somethig a bit like this:

^ .. (Parent Directory)

> However, most sane DOS/Windows applications _do_ eliminate it
> (explicitly). Couldn't GNOME/GTK+ file dialogs do that too (AbiWord, ?

Abiword would wait until it got fixed in Gnome/GTK.  (could not resist
responding to random mention of Abiword).

> My question was more related to political/usability issues related to
> presence of the ".", not the technical ones. If there's no practical
> reason the "." should be there, maybe I should prepare some patch for
> file dialogs ?

The state of the Dialog is is a known bone of contention.  The dialog
needs a complete overhaul.

Some people want a very simple replacement, others want to have the
equivalent of nautilus in the Dialog, so any solution would have to be
very extensible and include options to preview files because if the
default dialog does not (at least have the potential to) do these kinds of
things developers will inevitabley hack together some inconsistant dialog
with the features they want.

There are various people working on new dialogs i think libegg is one such
project, the desktop-devel list archives is probably a good place to look
for more discussions of this issue.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/