Re: SV: [Nautilus-list] Desktop folder

[Soeren Sonnenburg <sonnenburg informatik hu-berlin de>]

On Wed, 2002-03-20 at 15:12, Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-03-20 at 12:06, Chris Heywood wrote:
> 
>     I don't recall, what's the reasoning for evolution having the directory
>     called that?  I've seen threads around about it before, but I don't
>     really recall.  like I've seen people say, it's not like there's a great
>     deal a user can do, or would do frequently in there. 
> 
> I dunno. I need to ask Ettore. Personally I wish to do a
> s/evolution/.evolution/g as soon as possible, since there really is no
> reason I can think of why it is a non-hidden dir. It's not like a user
> should be going there to poke stuff with the filemanager..

Maybe it is the same reason why netscape uses ~/nsmail :-(
However, it was 'discussed' 1-3 months ago on the evo mailinglists. No
one from the developers cares about this issue although this is done in
5 minutes (even when introducing an environment variable like
EVOLUTION_MAIL=${HOME}/.evolution for that such that things do not
break). However people seem to like the idea to avoid ${HOME}/evolution.

>     but yeah, a solution to be able to turn off things from appearing on the
>     desktop would be a great help.  or some easy way for users to select the
>     desktop in the file selector if desktop != $HOME. 
> 
> Ximian has a patch to gtk that adds buttons for Desktop and Home. I
> guess there is a gnome file selector in the works too that should sort
> of help. But I just think the most clear and simple case is to just have
> home and desktop be the same thing.

A nice configurable file selector in gtk (where one can choose which
locations one wants to be included as buttons) and a context menu that
can do things in the root menu ( like e.g  on foo.tar one sees untar to
current location etc) would still be a big improvement.

I just tried desktop == $HOME. And I do now ask myself why I did not
have it like this from start. The only problem with that solution are
applications that can not be configured to create their working dirs in
$HOME which I consider to be a bug. I would even like to move as many 
${HOME}/.files as possible to ${HOME}/etc/ (and there without dot) 
which makes much more sense since ${HOME} is like / for the hard disk.

I now realized what kept me from using nautilus for daily work. The
pointers to my direcories in $HOME... and now emblems become _very_
useful too.

Soeren.