Re: My Critics about nautilus

[Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel gmx de>]

Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com> writes:

> The three-dots-cut is useless if you have some periodic data which has
> a common prefix.

Display the fullname in a tooltip when you mouse-over. Sure won't work
with lots and lots of files, but iconview itself already isn't really
useable for that, multicolum/smallicon or detailview don't have this
problem.

>> Beside that, I am not saying that
>> the screenshot shows the perfect layout for the icons (its just a
>> quick mockup by doubling the number of icons in the window)
>
> ...which also ignores the fact that preview icons are not always the
> same size as the  folder icons.

Even with preview-icons Nautilus is still wasting a whole damn lot of
space just for nothing.

>> the current icon layout is by far to wide, making it extremly hard to
>> browse larger directories, since to much scrolling is needed.
>
> I can't imagine how your konqueror and rox images fit say 1000 images
> on that same area, you still need to scroll like crazy (unless you use
> type-to-find)

rox and konq can display my home-directory completly without scrolling
in a singel window, Nautilus can't. Same so with many other
directories.

> and I guess it's besides the point to actually see what the file
> contents is (instead of just the name).

smalliconview in Rox still provides thumbnails, even with hundreds of
files on a single screen.

> Fair enough. I was actually thinking the smallicons view, but now I
> have a faint memory that it was dumped a loooong time ago (IIRC due
> to being unmaintained or something), correct me if I'm wrong.

As far as I know there never was a smallicon view, at least not in the
release versions, not sure what happened in CVS.

> But it's not really fair to make nautilus look deliberately bad.

Well its one of the major reasons Nautilus is relativly useless for
me.

> The same view with text below the icons is far more organized than
> with the texts next to icons (which, in my opinion, is horribly
> broken and as such should be removed),

Aehm, how is text below icons 'more organized'? Even the current
icon-view looks horrible disorganized due to its non-regular grid
layout (grid size varies with the size of previews, which beside other
problems makes proper incremantal loading of a directory basically
impossible to implement).

> Sure, but think how much space those 70-90 unusably small icons take?
> You could go over 100 with text-only!

The smallicons are still very useable, I can spot filetypes and even
previews in a tiny 16x16 icon without problems and much faster than I
ever could in a pure text-view, yes, it won't help you with a whole
bunch of photos which all have more or less exactly the same content,
but there are by far enough situations where smallicons are FAR
superior to the largeicon view.

> Seriously, it's not good to stuff things too tight, it makes the
> browsing even slower.

Well, no scrolling vs a few window full to scroll mean a whole lot
faster browsing experience in my book.

> And I browse my images (and other stuff for which there is a
> preview) by contents anyway, making the icons too small is not going
> to help locating things.

Yes, I browse my images in largeiconview too most of the time, however
I have more then enough stuff that aren't images. And even for images
smallicon view can be extremly helpfull from time to time.

The problem with nautilus is that if I want to see lots of files in a
single window, my only option today is to Zoom out, that however
renders the font completly unreadable pretty quickly.

-- 
WWW:      http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/ 
JabberID: grumbel jabber org 
ICQ:      59461927