[Usability] Tabbed Nautilus (was Re: two-panel nautilus view)

[karderio <karderio gmail com>]

On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 14:54 +1300, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: 
> 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 never suggested tiled windows in browsers, I was talking about tabs. I 
have changed the subject, can tabs be relevant here now ? :-)

> > 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 was of course still talking about tabs. 

> > 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.

Perhaps speed is the main reason for tabs in web browsers, on my
connection few pages take more than half a second to load, I use tabs to
reduce clutter. Firefox doesn't seem any slower opening a new window
than a tab, it is only slow the first time you start it, but my machine
is fairly recent.

I find tabs very useful in web browsers for organizing my browsing, I
have a browser window with all things GNOME, another with news stories,
one for Wikipedia edits, one for each topic I am looking up on etc...
Without tabs I would have tens and tens of web browsers open.

> >>> 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.

I'm not sure this "usefulness formula", applies to every case. Not being
able to drag to subfolders would not always reduce usefulness, it in
fact  depends entirely on the circumstances.

A user could choose to use tabs when he either does not need to copy
between the folders, or only to the folder and not it's subfolders. The
user would open a separate window when he needs to copy to subfolders.
In other words the user would have the choice, perhaps this could
complicate things for him however.

Love, Karderio