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

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Wed, 2003-04-23 at 06:24, Krzysztof Foltman wrote:
> > 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).
> However, most sane DOS/Windows applications _do_ eliminate it
> (explicitly). Couldn't GNOME/GTK+ file dialogs do that too (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 ?

Right, like the rest of my message said, it's basically laziness and
poor design.  .. and . should be Parent/Up and Refresh buttons and the
entries hidden.  dotfiles should also be hidden, which many
file-selectors (Tk, Motif, etc.) don't.  It's frickin irritating, and is
entirely because the designers didn't care/understand why they should've
done it differently.

GTK is getting a new file dialog that hopefully fixes this.  The current
one more or less *can't* be changed without breaking some apps, so it's
stuck looking, feeling, and acting like crap until the new one (and it's
corresponding API) are ready.

> 
> Chris
> 
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