Re: Mega patch to make spatial nautilus rock!

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2004-07-05 at 02:57, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've added a rather large patch to bugzilla (its too large to append to
> this email as its over 80kb in size) :
> 
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145427

I'm sorry for not having replied to this mail until now. I've been very
busy with redhat work and finishing off some other important stuff
before the feature freeze and my vacation. Its obvious that you've spent
a lot of time hacking this up, and I feel that requires me to give a
good serious reply. In particular, a reply that says no to some feature
or require large changes need to detail why, what would be need to be
changed, etc. This takes a lot of time, since it requires a lot of
thinking about the future path of Nautilus (its especially important to
be carefull in adding features to nautilus, because its very very hard
to later remove them).

Unfortunately, it seems I don't have any time to write such a well
thought out reply, because I'm still pretty busy, and I go on vacation
tomorrow. So, here are my current not-very-well articulated thoughts
about your ideas.

I would like to have bookmarks in spatial mode. However, rather than
just useing the browser window bookmarks i'd like to revamp the nautilus
bookmark system so that it works better with the file selector
bookmarks. I haven't really though this throught though, so I'm not sure
exactly what that means...

Keyboard shortcuts for the bookmarks looks interesting, but we have to
make sure we don't conflict with other global keybindings.

The pathbar (a re-rooting one) looks like a possibly interesting idea.
However i'm not sure about it. It takes a lot of space that can push out
the status bar text, and it would have to open new windows, which is
sort of different than the file selector version. It also exposes the
path concept in the spatial UI, which we've tried to avoid.

I really dislike the making of new preferences for behaviour. If some
new behaviour isn't good enought to be the default we just shouldn't add
it. We've managed to kill a lot of prefs since 1.x, which has made
nautilus imho a better app. Lets keep on that route. (Thats not saying
we can never add prefs, but we have to be very careful with that.)

I don't like the open-in-same-window part at all. If people want that
and have some problem with the browser window, we should instead work on
fixing the browser mode.
 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a bookish one-eyed werewolf on the hunt for the last specimen of a great 
and near-mythical creature. She's a green-fingered winged nun on the trail of 
a serial killer. They fight crime!