Re: [Usability] "File views"

[Krzysztof Foltman <kfoltman onet pl>]

Andrew W. Nosenko wrote:

> Therefore: Leave system directories in place.  Without any "turn
> on"/"turn off" -- these directories exists?  Yes.  Therefore should be
> showed.  The dot.
>  
Not very convincing to me. Not everything that exists needs to be showed:

- "." directory doesn't add much functionality, and it's another dir to 
skip when navigating via keyboard (more keystrokes for little gain, bad 
thing IMHO)
- ".." directory sometimes adds much to usability (see: Norton Commander 
clones), the name may be cryptic but that may be explained with a proper 
icon, or replacing ".." with some different text like  "[ parent 
directory ]"
- system directories (/usr and so on) - too useful to be skipped IMHO, 
if not for other things then for tech support
- switchable user/system files view might be an answer, but may be an 
overkill (what if user directories are scattered around the directory 
tree ? what about /tmp ?)
- .hidden directories - they're usually useless for most purposes (and 
get in the way making other, more important, directories harder to 
access = anti-usability), but sometimes they contain editable preference 
files etc - it might be nice if there was a _button_ (or _directly_ 
accessible menu option) for showing/hiding them in the file 
dialog/manager etc - if the option is too well hidden, the user might be 
unaware of the fact she looks at the filtered version of the directory 
listing

Krzysztof