[Usability] Nautilus: maybe a GtkFileChooser like UI?

[Michele Cella <michele cella gmail com>]

Hi list,

    First of all, excuse me if I don't elaborate much more on my 
thoughts but my english is not very fluent and It took me sometimes to 
prepare this little jewel (at least for me). :D

(
About me:
Since 2000 I follow, on a daily basis, many gnome mailing lists.
Today I've temporarily switched off my read only mode to actually write 
this.
Please be patient and don't flame me! :-)
)

So the subject says it all, from sometimes (since I've seen xfce thunar 
ui suggestions [1]) I'm convincing myself that Nautilus should adopt a 
GtkFileChooser like UI [2] (and it seems as I am not the only one [3] 
[4] [5]).

Why? Because I usually find myself to be much more comfort amble 
browsing my file system with the FileChooser and its UI paradigm than 
with Nautilus and its browser mode, so why not combine this with all the 
nice feature a nice file manager like Nautilus already provides?

(Not mentioning spatial mode here. I've never switched it off since its 
introduction but I must admit that often, when I need to do something, I 
click the File Browser launcher in my panel and start browsing.)

I also think that this will give us some other big benefits that will 
generally increase the user experience:

	* More coherency: you will browse your filesystem in the same
	way you open or save your documents.

	* Bye Bye Nautilus (out-of-sync)Bookmarks menu: you will find
	"exactly" the same places in your Nautilus sidebar, in your
	FileChooser sidebar and in your Places gnome panel menu item.

	Some days ago I had to explain to a friend of mine how he should
	actually open the FileChooser and drag (or add) his favourite
	folders from there to find them in the gnome panel Places menu.
	Needless to say that He already bookmarked them using Nautilus
	but nothing appeared.

	* No more evil URIs in front of the user: burn:/// will be a
	nice "CD/DVD Creator" button in the PathBar, fonts:/// a nice
	"Fonts" button and so on...

	* "PathBar" loaded folder ;-) (i don't think this is covered but
	something I will not mention here but you get the point...
	right?)

I think this discussion belongs to the usability list and maybe someday 
(in my hopes) to the nautilus one!

So what do you other people think?

Ciao,
Michele

[1] http://thunar.xfce.org/wiki/ui:suggestion-20050320
[2] 
http://thunar.xfce.org/wiki/media/ui/suggestion-20050320/shortcuts_buttons.png
[3] http://nat.org/2005/may/#New-Linux-desktop-software
[4] http://www.advogato.org/person/Burgundavia/diary.html?start=0
[5] http://www.advogato.org/person/Burgundavia/diary.html?start=1