GNOME and the File selection dialog box

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel nuclecu unam mx>]

Hello dear GNOMErs,

   The GNOME project needs a decenct default dialog box for file
saving and loading.  The file selector widget in Gtk sadly is not what
we need for various reasons:

     - It lacks internationalization support.	

     - It lacks gnome-stock support.

     - It lacks gnome-entry support (ie, history of previously
       selected files)

     - It lacks metadata support (details in a second).

   So we need to write a gnome file selector that has at least the
above features, but I would like very much to add some extra things
that I have noticed we need.   I have listed some of the needs I think
we need, and I would appreciate if people could tell me which other
features they would like to see in the GNOME file selector or what
things about look and feel are important in the GNOME file selector. 

     - Optionally let the programmer provide a number of recognized
       file types to load.  Probably just a list of extensions that
       the program recognizes.

       Stuff like: ("All files", "*"), ("Lotus 1-2-3 files", "*.wk1")
       and so on. 

     - Provide a way for the programmer to specify an
       auto-type-select- upon-user-selecting-file feature.  By default
       we could provide a callback that would do regexp matching on
       the file, if the user clicks on a file with a ".jpg" extension,
       we would auto-select "JPEG file (*.jpg)" on the file type
       region. 

     - Provide a way to make it extensible: Programmers should be able
       to extend an existing file selection dialog box with stuff like
       minimized previews of the data content (by packing/appending
       further widgets to the file selection).

     - Metadata support: Tom Tromey's metadata support would be very
       handy in this situation, we could lookup the key
       "Quick/MiniIcon" for every file displayed on the file selector
       and provide an icon next to the file when displaying.

     - We need to support the features founds on the Gtk file
       selector: completion and file operations.


Best wishes,
Miguel.