About folder backgrounds

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

Hello!

There is this nice arstechnica review of GNOME 2.6, and they complain
about not being able to set the background for each folder individually
(which would make sense from a spatial POV). Of course we know that's
possible, just slightly hard to discover.
One user at another place brought up an interesting question. He asked
whether it would be possible to apply a background to "this folder and
all children". His reasoning for wanting this was, that with spatial
navigation you can easily end up with very similar folders which are
hard to distinguish (imagine a set of the users files and a backup of
exactly the same files). If the user could set the background of a whole
tree, he could immediately identify to which tree this folder belongs. 

So in general, I'm getting kinda excited about the idea of using
backgrounds to specifically mark certain folders or even trees. Lately I
noticed that I'm getting an increasingly hard time to distinguish
individual windows on my desktop, which seems to be a downside of too
much consistency. :) Everything looks the same.

To sum it up, my suggestion would be to make "Set as background for this
folder" the default (or always pop up the choice menu) and a very nice
feature would be to have child windows inherit the background of their
nearest parent window with a custom background (unless it has its own
custom background).

What do you think? I believe this would make the custom backgrounds not
just a visual gimmick but a very powerful feature.


Daniel