Re: Nautilus bugs and design choices

[Andrew Sobala <andrew sobala net>]

On Mon, 2002-07-08 at 21:54, Erik Pukinskis wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-07-08 at 16:39, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> > What people are used to from windows does (or should) not matter; web
> > browsers even less since Nautilus is not a web browser.
> 
> I agree that it's counter-productive to let consistency with windows get
> in the way with internal consistency in GNOME.  That said...
> 
> The reason to have browser-style navigation in a file manager is that
> many people treat their disks like the internet.  I don't have a
> citation, but I've been told that while programmers tend to keep track
> of hierarchies very easily, less technical people view their computing
> experience as a linear thing.  They follow a sequence of steps to
> accomplish a goal.  Because of this, it's easy for them to grok that in
> order to go to where they were a few steps ago, they don't navigate "up"
> the tree, but they go back through the steps, like they would in a web
> browser.

Interestingly, I always navigate "Back" even when I really mean "Up"
because 99% of the time the buttons do the same thing (and I'd say that
I keep track of my filesystem as a hierarchy). Since you click on
folders to move into the directory tree, back is normally "up and out."
This only breaks when following symlinks.

Just my OT 2p

> 
> At least that's my understanding of it. 
> 
> Erik Pukinskis
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-- 
Andrew

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