Re: [Usability]file selection dialogs - curious about presence of "." directory

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

Short answer: laziness.

A directory in UNIX does actually contain a "." entry, which points to
it's own inode.  This has a few practical uses, altho those are mostly
command-line related stuff.  (for example, if you must specify a
directory, you can use ".")

File dialogs/browsers generally just spew out a list of the directory
contents, which includes . and .. - you'll notice a lot of UNIX file
dialogs also spit out .blah directories/files (hidden files/dirs)
without a method of turning that off.  It's all laziness - the author
just didn't bother to check the file name in question before spitting it
out to the dialog.

There's also some small practical reasons to include the "." directory,
for example, to allow you to refresh your view of the current
directory.  Given that a good UI should have a refresh button if this is
commonly needed, or use something like FAM, this reason is rather silly
these days...

On Tue, 2003-04-22 at 14:12, Krzysztof Foltman wrote:
> I wonder about one thing that always surprised me in various X11
> interfaces:
> 
> Why do most file selection dialogs in X11 apps display the "." directory
> (and usually place it as first) in directory section of file selection
> dialogs ? I think usefulness of being able to go to directory you're
> currently in is rather limited (to say the least - double clicking on it
> doesn't seem to do anything). In my opinion it only occupies screen
> space and confuses users. The DOS/Windows counterparts (Norton Commander
> and all the clones) just remove that directory from the list.
> 
> Is there any practical reason to include that directory in those list ?
> I'm not trying to start a flamewar, just curious about why it wasn't
> removed (maybe some UNIX-specific reason).
> 
> Chris
> 
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