[Nautilus-list] FW: scripts and other feedback

[John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com>]

Forwarding this response to Nautilus-list so others can read it also. Chris
has a useful set of specific comments/requests here.

John
----------
From: Chris Heywood <psych primus com au>
Date: 02 May 2001 14:02:54 +1000
To: John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com>
Subject: Re: [Nautilus-list] backgrounds dialog empty

On 01 May 2001 07:12:19 -0700, John Sullivan wrote:
> We deliberately started with the scripts feature being extremely simple,
> expecting to put more work into improving it later. There are so many
> different ways to improve/change it that we wanted to give people a chance
> to use it for awhile so we could get good feedback on the most desired
> improvements, rather than devoting the time to the first feature ideas that
> came up. We're on the verge of releasing 1.0.3, so we're very unlikely to
> make changes before that. After 1.0.3 is out there for awhile, we expect to
> get a lot more feedback on this and other new features. Patches are of
> course considered at any time.

Thanks again for the reply.  The script feature's great and 1.0.3 looks
great. I'm sure you'll have lots of positive feedback...  I find 1.0.3
considerably more stable and usable than 1.0.2 and earlier (I was having
problems with Nautilus crashing due to some kind of mount problems).

> Among the ideas proposed so far (no particular order):
> 
> 1) Make script menu hierarchical, a la Apple menu
> 2) Allow scripts to be insensitive based on current selection (e.g. if a
> script only works on image files and no image files are selected)
> 3) Allow script names to be localized rather than using file name directly
> 4) Allow each script to specify a localizable tip message
> 5) Allow each script to specify a category (conversion, viewing, editing,
> utility, etc) that can be used to automatically group the scripts in the
> menu
> 6) Define an alternative home for scripts somewhere in ~/
> 7) Allow scripts to have keyboard shortcuts
> 8) Allow scripts to be placed arbitrarily in menu hierarchy
> 9) Put scripts in background right-click menu

They all sound great =)  Put me down for 7, 8, and 9 personally..
 
> I'm sure I'm missing some.
> 
> It's great that people are interested in the scripts feature and we really
> appreciate the feedback. Hopefully we'll have the time to keep improving it
> after 1.0.3. The more feedback the better, as with everything.

With the addition of the scripts feature it obviously makes it a lot
easier for people to implement their own features than asking you guys
to do everything.

You mentioned the more feedback the better.  I hadn't really sent in
much feedback to regarding Nautilus because I figured you guys would get
it all sorted out in the end... but seeing as you mentioned the more
feedback the better here's a few thoughts/requests.


- I would like Nautilus to leave my mount's alone and not watch their
status.  This would result in:
    - Nautilus not having to wait for CD's to spin up when it loads and
    at other various times
    - CD icons not shown on desktop.
    - CD not ejected when unmounted
    - Window not opened when CD mounted (I saw there was supposed to be
    a preference for this in the code, is the GUI going to be
    implemented for this?)
 I'm sure this wouldn't be something everyone would want, and it may be
something Eazel wouldn't consider implementing.  If this wasn't possible
would it be possible to have preferences for:
    - Don't eject CD on unmount unless called from Nautilus shell
    - Don't open window on CD mount
    - Remember desktop icon locations on a per-mount basis
 This would of course still result in the waiting for the CD spin up
times.

- Ability to make the sidebar display one panel as default (eg. tree
view).  

- Maybe against the sidebar tradition, but the ability to have a sidebar
panel take up the whole sidebar?  Without the tabs?  (eg. for having the
tree view turned on all the time with the extra vertical space at the
top and bottom which would be consumed by the tabs)

- The tree view seems to go on a bit of an expanding spree when opened.
Would it be possible to have it only expand the current directory you're
in when it opens (and the higher levels of course)?  On the subject of
the tree view, I would find it really useful if it were possibly to have
a setting where only the home directory and maybe the /mnt directory
were shown.  There isn't much room in the tree view and when not root I
mainly only use ~ and /mnt.  This I think would be handy for beginner
users aswell.  I think maybe a preference to have more compact tree view
vertically so more fits in would be great.  More of an ugly view without
icons etc.

- New Terminal in all popup menus which opens a new terminal in the
current location (this could be done by the user if the scripting is
extended)

- Right click on item in news panel allows opening in Galeon, other
browsers etc

- Make it possible in some way to configure how eel determines if the
background is dark.  (method eel_background_is_dark).  At the moment I
have to edit the return value before I can use it with the background I
choose.

- I used to specify a different terminal to be used other than
gnome-terminal in the eel-gnome-extensions.c  But now I see it looks for
the default that is configured by GNOME?  How do you change what the
default is?

- When I grab Nautilus from CVS I also remove the code that creates a
home link on the desktop.  I didn't want the link going to my home dir
named what it's set as for default, and if you change it to another
title another home link is created.  Not sure how this should be dealt
with.

Hope the feedback is helpfull and not a nag.  I think Nautilus is great
(coming from someone who usually just uses a terminal for file
managing).  Hopefully I haven't ranted about anything which has already
been dealt with in CVS (I'm up to date as of last night's anoncvs).

Two quick questions:  Any idea when/if the window creating speed is
going to be improved?  This is the only area I have speed issues in with
Nautilus currently and to my understanding it's a Bonobo issue?

And where would I source a version of FAM which can be used with current
(eg. 2.4.3/4 kernels?)

Thanks for your time.

cheers,
Chris