Re: [Usability] Re: two-panel nautilus view

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

I've been thinking about the two panel interface since the question came
up a few months ago and I have a few thoughts on the issue.  (There was a
bug report around somewhere.)

I assumed the question had already been largely answered with the
recommendation to "provide a clean patch the Nautilus developers can
easily maintain".  I thought the nautilus developers had made it pretty
clear they were not going to implement the request but at the time there
didn't seem to be any objection to making it possible if was done in a
clean and managable way.

Rather than trying to add this functionality to Nautilus it might be
easier to seek out alternatives.

In case anyone was not already aware gftp has a "Commander" two panel
style interface can be used to view two local drives at once.
http://gftp.seul.org/

I've requested they turn this on by default instead of leaving one side
empty until the user chooses to connect somewhere, although gftp
developement seems to be relatively slow at the moment.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330418

PCMan looks like an interesting project
http://gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=1263
It doesn't have the commander two panel style interface but it does offer
a tabbed file manager.  (I like the attention to detail, by choosing the
label "A_ddress" for the location bar it can have the same Alt+D
keybinding users expect from Microsoft Explorer and Internet explorer)


On Wed, 8 Feb 2006, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:


> > 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,

never say never

> because hardly any Web pages support external drag-and-drop,

I loved how Internet Explorer on Mac allowed you to drag an image from a
web page to your desktop.  The Microsoft Macintosh developers knew their
stuff.   (Epiphany may also have offered this but I'm not sure.)

> 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.

A web browser developed in Ireland called "Tablane" has taken the idea of
Tabs and split windows a little futher and presented it as a big selling
point.  http://www.tablane.com/

This isn't a brilliantly new idea or anything, I'm sure it was obvious to
many people as soon as frames were designed (or even earlier).  I
previously wrote some javascript to generate a frameset and present two
page sides by side for comparison but taking the idea and making it into
something convincingly useful is much harder (like so many ideas we
discuss).
For my simple hack see "Javascript - Better Split"
http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~horkana/dev/javascript/

The KDE file manager and web browser - Konqueror - has long allowed you to
have the split windows.  This feature can be used in the web browser too
and it was certainly the first web browser I ever saw do this trick but I
think it was due due to a lucky crossover of the feature from the file
manager more than any kind of a well planned feature.

> > 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.

Agreed.  It also wasnt just the web but also the web browser, as Mozilla
was far slower to open a whole new window than to open a new tab.  I'm
sure Firefox is slower to open a new window than to open a new tab but
with faster computers the difference isn't so noticable anymore.

Sure there are some benefits to Tabs reinventing the window manager inside
the browser but speed was always been the primary reason for tabs in
Mozilla.

> > if you could drag and drop files to tabs, as in firefox for example.

I didn't realise the tab head was a drag target	until you mentioned it.

> > 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>

Oh, button views!  A far better way to present a single click interface if
you ask me (but you didn't, look how easily distracted I get).

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

> Probably. :-)

I think there are enough examples of the two panel view to show it can
work.  The only questions left are who will implement the idea and who
will maintain it.  This is why started by saying I thought the question
has been answered already and unless the Nautilus developer say otherwise
I assume they will not be implmenting the suggestion but would be willing
to accept a patch which made it possible without adding too much of a
maintaince burdern for them.

Best of Luck

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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