Re: Browsing deep hierarchies in spatial mode



On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 01:40 +0200, Enver ALTIN wrote:
> Merhaba,
> 
> On Sat, 2004-11-20 at 14:40 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > There used to be a KDE menu for the filesystem hierarchy that was fun to
> > play with, because you could easily get huge numbers of items in a
> > single menu, or a zillion levels of submenu. You'd run out of screen
> > space on the right, then submenus start appearing to the left, then you
> > get back to the left side, then start going right again...
> 
> In about half of my attempts I have been failing to get deeper into the
> hierarchy after the menu code blows on the face of the screen. Hovering
> around can easily cause a few sub-menu-folders to get hidden back, which
> is expected. Total mess.
> 
> What's wrong with spatial browsing? It works very well for me.

The fact of the matter is, the context-menu method is usually used when
you have a folder on your screen and want to get to a location a couple
of levels below it. You right click the folder, browse 2 levels, and
you're done.

You'd never want to browse / using a context menu. That would be stupid.
This is all about a shortcut from whatever your current context is to
some deeper level.

Think of this idea as the natural counterpart to the pop-up menu at the
bottom-left corner of every spatial nautilus window - it just goes in
the other direction. Since that menu is considered acceptable in our
current model, then the "it's not spatial enough" argument I'm seeing in
the thread really doesn't count for much.

The only way you'd likely find yourself with a billion menus filling
your screen would be if you browsed into 'Computer->Filesystem" using
the context menu. I am guessing that could be disabled pretty easily. Of
course, we could also just enable it and let users decide when it's
appropriate to use context-menu browsing - they'll learn what it's good
for and what it isn't good for pretty quickly. 

Don't write this idea off because KDE had something with some
fundamental differences that most of us didn't like. Context-menu
browsing wouldn't affect existing behaviour, so people that are happy
with the status quo could keep on status-quoing - and the rest of us
could stop clicking so much. :)

-- 
Gabriel Bauman <gabe bravenet com>

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