Re: display full path in spatial nautilus

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

I sent this to usability but forgot to cc nautilus-list anyway heres my 
response. 

From: Hasbullah bin Pit <sebol ikhlas com>
> Thing to discuss....  
>
> When I'm using windows, i always set "Display full path at title bar"
> in both type of explorer (spatial or navigation)  
>
>
> for me it is usefull for me to know the path of current opened folder.  
>
> in nautilus spatial mode, i cant find any option to enable it.
> I think full path should be displayed somewhere, either in status bar or 
> title bar.. or some other place...  

Using the full path as the window title makes the window list thoroughly 
unusable for *most* users who aren't going to have ten folders with the same 
name.[1] The majority of users don't tend to use really deeply nested 
folders either so sacrificing these users for the minority case where  a 
developer has .../cvs/epiphany/src ..cvs/nautilus/src etc. isn't really a 
good design decision. I actually think we need a hig recommendation here 
saying that you should not include the full path of a file in your apps 
window title. [2] 

What I think would be a better solution imo would be to change the list view 
to be more like the macos9 list view (ie a tree). This would allow you to 
view multiple levels of hierarchy within the same window and has the added 
benefit of displaying hierarchy as a visual element as oppose to requiring 
users to see the filesystem path string and than convert it mentally into 
the filesystem folder model. This way I could open my nautilus cvs folder 
and view the whole code base as a single project which would be pretty 
useful. 

dave 


[1] I *once* thought this was a good idea too, but both seth and greg 
pointed out the pitfalls to me. You can search nautilus bugzilla. 

[2] gedit becomes useless to me so often when I can't find the file i've 
open in the window list because i have ten text files open all named "/home"