Re: [Usability] "File views"

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, [iso-8859-1] Joao Victor wrote:

> Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 14:11:17 -0300 (ART)
> From: "[iso-8859-1] Joao Victor" <googlyboy2 yahoo com br>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] "File views"
>
> Hi folks, this email is about a suggestion i have for
> Nautilus, i'd like to hear what you think about it.
>
> Well, because of Linux modularity we all have lots of
> folders such as "/bin", "/boot", "/configs", "/dev",
> "/etc", "/initrd", "/lib", "/mnt", etc, etc etc. The
> thing is that many of these folders are rarely
> accessed from Nautilus, and they may be confusing for
> the common/new user (not to mention that some of these
> folders have cryptic names).
>
> So, i think it would be nice if we could just hide the
> folders we don't want to see in the tree; that is,

If the administrator would prefer only to show the file tree from Home
that would be a useful feature I dont know enough about Nautilus to say
how hard this might be (it might be trivial).

On a large multi user system users might want to read and execute a lot of
files from Nautilus even if they cannot write them.
Users may also want to share files with each other.

If I remember correctly if you are at the top of the home tree (which is
rooted in you userdirectory) in the KDE file manager and you press the up
button then the rest of the tree is then shown, which is quite nice for
users who do want to see the rest of the file system.

> create "file views". It's a really simple concept,
> actually. In the Windows world you can easily
> acomplish that by making a folder occult, but in Linux

not familiar with this terminology, when you say occult I think black
magic and animal sacrifices, and even if some software does seem that hard
to use I dont think that is what you meant.

Hmm, vague recollection, does occult litterally mean hidden?

There is certainly merit in the idea of hiding some of the complexity from
the users but balancing that with the needs of the more advanced users
could be quite difficult.  Nautilus does allow to hide certain file types
but "system folders" are recognised as different from any other folder
types

I think the Nautilus developers would probably already have good ideas on
how to go about this.  Telling them what you are tying to do and not
saying too much about how you think it should be done is the best way to
go.

Sincerely

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