RFC: On-line Content Filtering of directories

[Diego Gonzalez <diego pemas net>]

Hi

I have implemented a new feature for Nautilus, it is a way to filter the contents of a directory, right now it only works when Nautilus is in spatial mode. If there is interest in it, it can easily be extended to work on navigational windows.

I have created this feature to overcome a problem that i'm having as a consequence of using the spatial mode: when i started to use the spatial mode, i found it incredible anoying to have deep hierarchies of directories, as a consecuence i reduced them, this meant in many cases that i got directories with a lot of files, and altough i have long meaningful names for many of them it is quite hard to find a file in there. This patch allows me to quickly search the contents of a directory for files that match the string entered.

A more complete description with the patch proposed and screenshots can be found at:
http://www.es.gnome.org/~diego/index.html

Cheers,
Diego

PD: An extension of this feature could be used to rework the regular expresion selection (Ctrl+S), as i think that this feature is more visible and also easier to used by common desktop users that do not understand how regular expressions work.