Re: [Usability] New Pathbar

[Owen Williams <ywwg usa net>]

On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 17:24 +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:

> If the user wants to browse to hidden directories, he can also use
> ctrl-H (in Nautilus). We could add that binding to the file chooser as
> well for toggling display of hidden files.
> 
> If you are bound to use the keyboard anyway, isn't a simple ctrl-l
> reasonable?

The current methods to reveal hidden files and get a location entry were
completely undiscoverable for me.  I only found out about them by
reading this mailing list.  There's not even a help icon in the file
selector that could be used to figure this out.

I like the idea of adding a location bar and making the folder names
clickable. Users are used to seeing text-based location bars when web
browsing.  As the user scrubs the mouse over the names, the underline
will appear and the mouse cursor will change, signalling a clickable
element.  Again this is feedback learned when browsing the web. Advanced
users could go a step further and edit the text directly, at which point
tab completion becomes useful.

I think it's a bad idea to use arrows instead of slashes, because a
power user might wonder if they are supposed to type an arrow somehow.
And if one had to explain how to type in a location to a newbie, there's
a good opportunity for confusion when the slash becomes converted
somehow to an arrow.  It seems easier to teach that a slash separates
items than to try to come up with a new, untypable separator.

(And once beagle becomes ubiquitous, that location bar could double as a
beagle entry box for users who just type a filename in the bar and
expect it to search the drive, like how URL bars auto-search google)

Owen Williams