Re: $HOME as desktop

[Shaun ONeil <shaun dog-berry com>]

On Fri, 2003-05-16 at 17:29, Ole Laursen wrote:
> Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> writes:
> >  - We don't control the other software the user
> >    runs, we don't control what software they run
> >    in the past; you may claim that everybody
> >    should change, but that isn't realistic; looking
> >    in my home directory.
> 
> Why does this really have to be a problem? Add support for a .hidden
> file that contains a list of files which shouldn't be displayed. Then
> in the right-click menu for files, have a "Hide" entry that puts the
> file name in .hidden and pops up a window with all the currently
> hidden files. Then that window could support drag & drop to
> hide/reshow files. Or something like that.
> 
> We could even provide a default .hidden file with a list of known
> broken names.
> 
> So currently $HOME-as-desktop sucks a little because of this legacy
> problem, but a general solution seems to be extremely easy to
> implement. If it were in fact implemented, would that change people's
> mind about the subject?

I'm curious how this would be done without making it confusing. dotfiles
are usually termed "hidden", so we'd have two definitions of hidden? If
I ask nautilus to "show hidden files" on my desktop, does that mean
revealing ~/evolution/, or a few hundred[1] dotfiles / dotdirs ?

I'm currently using $HOME as desktop to follow this better, and fwiw I
notice pan also creates a ~/News

Shaun

[1]: not an exageration -
~ $ ls | wc -l
      8
~ $ ls -a | wc -l
    234