Re: [Nautilus-list] tree view

[Ian McKellar <yakk-nautilus yakk net au>]

On Sat, May 13, 2000 at 03:58:24PM -0400, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> Copy/Paste of files is the way most people I know work in Windows
> Explorer.  Rather than drag the files around, they select the files they
> want to move or copy, and they right click and select cut or copy, then
> they go to do the destination folder, and select paste.
> 
> I believe that their reasoning is that this must work like moving text in
> Word works, and then that is the way that moving stuff in visio (or
> almost any other program) works, so they want everything to work the same 
> way. 

The problem is that copy and paste in the file manager under Windows is 
/nothing/ like copy and paste under Word. There is no clipboard. If you
copy a file, delete it and then try to paste it, it fails. Thats really
dumb, and if people are used to copy and paste in Word, then they will
get confused and they will lose data. If you cut a file in windows and
then log out / shut down the file stays there - even though you've cut
it. Wrong Wrong Wrong!

I don't see why we should implement a broken, inconsistent UI that some
halfbaked, halfwit, thumbless UI designer in Redmond came up with. We're 
smarter than that - and there are plenty of equivalent technologies to 
replicate.

We could invent a `clipboard' folder (like the Desktop and Trash folders). 
There could be one per filesystem (so that moves are cheap) and we could 
implement copy and paste off that.  That would require quite a bit of work 
though, and to implement copy and paste without that would be a waste of 
time. It seems that the Eazel hackers don't have the time to implement
this for 1.0, so unless someone decides to donate their time it won't
happen.

Ian

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Ian  McKellar |    Email: yakk(a)yakk.net |    Web: http://www.yakk.net/
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