[Usability] Re: two-panel nautilus view

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On 8 Feb, 2006, at 12:53 PM, karderio wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 13:00 +1300, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> > On 7 Feb, 2006, at 4:56 AM, karderio wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 13:05 +0100, Peter Lundqvist wrote:
> > > > On Fri, 3 Feb 2006, Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote:
> > > > > On Thu, 2006-02-02 at 22:24 +0100, Oliver Tobin wrote:
> > > > > > while using nautilus, i had the idea that a two-panel-view is
> > > > > > useful for copying or moving files and other things like this.
> > > ...
> > > > > I think the same functionality can be achieved just fine by 
> > > > > opening two separate Nautilus windows or..?
> > >
> > > It could, but one window can hide the other,
> >
> > If that's a major concern, you can use a tiling window manager.
> > And even non-tiling window managers should make it easier to arrange
> > windows side by side, whether they be folders, Web pages, or
> > spreadsheets. This isn't a Nautilus-specific problem, so it shouldn't
> > have a Nautilus-specific solution.
>
> I agree, it's not a Nautilus specific problem, I think web browsers
> suffered from the same problem until they started using tabs.

Web browsers have never suffered from this problem, because hardly any 
Web pages support external drag-and-drop, except for dragging text into 
text fields. (In theory you could drop files into <input type="file"> 
controls, but Gecko doesn't support that yet.) So there's been even 
less reason to have tiled browser windows than there is to have tiled 
word processor windows, and much less reason than there is to have 
tiled Nautilus windows. Again, tabs aren't relevant here.

> I am very glad that this was also addressed in gedit, for example.

Unless multi-panel windows have been added in the past four months (I 
use gedit on Ubuntu 5.10), it hasn't been addressed at all. (I would 
find them useful, but then I think gedit is supposed to be simple...)

> I believe most would agree that tabs in web browsers and text editors
> have many advantages. Would tabs not bring the same benefits to
> nautilus ?

The main reason for tabs in Web browsers seems to be that the Web is 
hideously slow, so people want to open pages in the background. That 
doesn't apply to the large majority of folders you might open. But 
again, that's not relevant to this discussion, which is about two-panel 
Nautilus views.

> > > which would not happen with tabs.
> >
> > Actually it would *always* happen with tabs, because overlapping each
> > other exactly is what tabs do. Tabs aren't relevant to this thread.
>
> Of course tabs would always overlap each other, but this would be fine
> if you could drag and drop files to tabs, as in firefox for example. 
> The tabs themselves are always visible and never overlap, even if only 
> the contents of the selected tab are visible.

Where tiled windows had usefulness n, a tabbed window would have 
usefulness a bit over sqrt(n), because you couldn't easily see or drag 
to the subfolders of the folders the tabs represented.

Mac OS 8 and 9 let you drag folder windows to become permanent tabs at 
the bottom of the screen, that would pop up immediately when you 
dragged to them. 
<http://edtech.sandi.net/presentations/os8/wn/wneou/wneou.html>

> I'm sorry if tabs are not relevant to this thread, perhaps I should 
> have started a new thread ?
> ...

Probably. :-)

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/