Gnome filepicker windows
From the Ars Technica review of Gnome 2.20:
GNOME’s file dialogs are still extremely weak in many respects. For instance, the file dialogs still do not support even basic file management tasks like renaming and deletion. The file dialogs also lack adequate support for thumbnail display. Dialogs in some applications will show a thumbnail for one item at a time, but the file dialog windows do not display thumbnails next to individual files in the list—a feature that can be found in both KDE and Windows. It’s a serious deficiency that has long detracted from the general usefulness of GNOME’s file dialogs. In many cases, when I use a file dialog in GNOME, I find myself opening up a Nautilus browser and navigating to the same path so that I can see thumbnails or perform file maintenance tasks before saving or loading.
A long time ago, there was a patch for Gtk produced by the ROX team that added a draggable icon to the Gtk filepicker window — to save your document, just drag that icon to a Nautilus window. Those of you who remember RISC OS might remember that that’s the way you saved files there:
There are a few UI problems with filepickers, as mpt pointed out a while back, and the drag-icon-to-save model neatly avoids them. There are, of course, issues: the main one is that in order to properly implement drag-and-drop saving, apps should use the freedesktop X Direct Save protocol, which I think means that every app must be patched to allow its saving to be accessed as a stream (so you can “save” a file directly into another application). I might be wrong about that being hard, though — my C-fu is not strong, which is pretty high on the list of reasons why I’m not trying to make this happen already.
The Tango project’s Window Experiments mockups have the draggable icon living in the top corner of the window itself, which seems like a great idea to me.
Is anyone working on this? I’d love to see whether it works out in practice.
The “icon in titlebar” thing is also one of OS X’s useful features. It doesn’t appear in things like Firefox, where it’s confusing as to what it represents (Though the tab icons work the same way), but one of the ways I tend to use it is you can drag a folder into a filepicker window, and the filepicker will focus on that folder.
66 minutes later
Problems:
dragging is not accessible for some people, for example blind people/people who find using the mouse hard
it requires the use of the mouse
it requires having file manager windows/file drop points available at all times
it requires you to have the directory you want to save the file in ready. this would not be so bad if we had spring loaded folders (see my patch from 2003), but apple has patented those.
It is a lot slower to complete the action than a normal file chooser
To be honest, i don’t see mpt’s points as being overly valid. They are the standard “why dont we use nautilus as the file selector” ilk. If someone wants to try to add a drag icon in the file chooser, i’ll not complain, but as the only way to save files? no, it has too many of its own flaws.
67 minutes later
iain: good point on the accessibility issues. That’s a valid criticism. I concede the point about spring-loaded folders (how very irritating!), although there might be some other way around that.
Having file windows open all the time is not something I particularly see as a problem, though; what’s wrong with that?
Adding a drag icon to the file chooser might be a compromise, and I’m sure I saw someone do some work in that regard a while back.
83 minutes later
Update: spring-loaded-folders is apparently a compile-time option in Nautilus (iain: is that your patch?), so I might recompile Nautilus to do it.
Update update: According to a post on the Gentoo forums spring-loaded-folders is configurable on in gconf! Since the alleged Apple patent doesn’t apply to me here in the UK, I can turn that on quite nicely, I think. How do I confirm?
87 minutes later
Aha, Iain, your patch is here, yes? Do you know if it’s still applicable? (I’ll try compiling tonight if I get a chance.)
100 minutes later
[...] GtkApplication and GtkUnique Perhaps GtkApplication is a smart place to put the window DND stuff (now that nautilus supports XDS) [...]
2 hours later
You can get reasonably close to “spring loaded folders” when viewing a folder as list instead of as icons.
The patent makes me wonder exactly when the first GUI system added “spring unminimised application” (or whatever it’s called when an app is unminimised when dragging a file on top of its button in the panel). There seems to be an amazingly small inventive step from that to “spring loaded folder”.
2 hours later
It’s interesting that you chose to talk about that particular point. I found the not being able to rename/delete files through the filechooser much more interesting/annoying, and I’d like to see that implemented first. Followed by thumbnails. Having an extra Window open just to be able to identify a file properly only clutters up your workspace. Let’s keep the workspace as clean and simple as possible!
2 hours later
Art: my thought is that you get rid of filepickers entirely; then if you want to rename a file, you can just do it in the Nautilus window that you have open to save the file into! Similarly with thumbnails; Nautilus already does that, so because you’ll already have a Nautilus window open, you get thumbnailing already. The issues are all about trying to cram more of the complexity in the filemanager into a filepicker which isn’t really designed for them: why not just use the file manager?
2 hours later
I have always wondered why it is not possible to rename/delete files in the file picker dialog. In windows file picker it is very convenient that you can change the name of a badly named file or delete irrelevant file when you notice them while opening/saving some other file. In gnome you need to launch a separate app for file management, hindering your workflow.
Now that I looked there are a couple of bugs about this (301349 and 325150). Actually, the first one of those has a classic example of “we know what you want” mentality often (IMO usually unnecessarily) attributed to gnome: “Sorry to disappoint you, but that was actually a design decision. It boils down to how we expect our users to use the desktop, and using a “Load file” dialog to manage your files is considered to be horribly wrong”.
Maybe wrong in some aesthetical sense, but occasionally very convenient.
3 hours later
that looks like my patch, yes. I would doubt if it still works, it is 4 and a half years old.
Spring loaded folders is very much not a compile time option in the official nautilus release. Use it at your own risk, it only just about worked 4 and a half years ago.
Alex thinks he might have merged the non UI parts of the patch to make it easier to patch in the future. Who knows.
And to Trewas: Its not a case of “We know what you want”, its a case of “This is what we’re going to do” Developers are not at the behest of users to do “what the user wants”, if a developer does not agree with what his user wants so be it.
3 hours later
Yes. I once played around in my head for a few weeks on this idea: removing file pickers completely and using simple relations between preexisting windows. It would be nice to be able to just drag a Abiword window into my documents folder and watch it get sucked into a file. I would personallky find it much quicker. I recognize there are accessibility concerns, though. I really do hate the idea of making MY experience suck because some dude can’t grab a mouse, though.
I would hate this to be the ONLY way, of course, because sometimes my hand isn’t on the mouse, and I don’t want it there. I still think the idea is cool and has merit.
5 hours later
Another bad thing about Gnome filepicker: if you browse to a folder with a couple of 10s of 1000s of files, it freezes until it’s digested them all.
6 hours later
Nautilus? Are you kidding? What make you think that everybody that is using GTK applications have Nautilus installed? Or what make you think that they are using Nautilus? Do you realized that there are many and many WMs out there? The GTK+2 isn’t GNOME! I don’t use Nautilus and I am still stuck with VIM 6.x (with GTK+2), because it uses old file selector that has rename, delete and new folder. I use these features a lot daily.
8 hours later
Joe: no reason why the file manager you drag to has to be Nautilus; the whole point of XDS being specified is that other file managers could support it (and indeed they do, as much as Nautilus does; Konq, the ROX filer, etc).
9 hours later
I don’t use file manager either. :-) It is wasting time to go different windows to do something. GTK+2 is only one toolkit that can’t do. :-(
9 hours later
Joe: uhm, the filepicker is a different window. Why use a hamstrung file manager (the file picker) rather than a real actual file picker?
25 hours later
The article sited is spot on. I really do not like GNOME’s file dialog. It is ugly and not user friendly. I really wish this would be overhauled for the next release. Even more so I wish I had the skills to do this.
38 hours later
I’ve been thinking about this since you posted it and I’m still divided on it (and I’m too busy to think properly as well).
On one hand I’m all in favour of removing redundant windows - think of TortoiseSVN/CVS on Windows compared to an SVN/CVS client with file browser included for a prime example.
On the other hand it doesn’t feel quite right to me - the context switch of changing to a different app to find your location to save will take a bit of getting used to (yes, I realise that it’s nominally the same thing, but it’s quite a big mental change when you have to effectively come out of the app you’re using to do a “save as”. As it stands, the file picker feels like part of the app even if it is a common component).
There are other issues as well - what type of file are you wanting to save with the GIMP for example? What compression would you like with your jpeg sir? And all that.
40 hours later
The file requester surely is a redundant window and finding a way to remove it would be cool.
Perhaps it would be possible to integrate this into Gimmie.
http://www.beatniksoftware.com/gimmie/Main_Page
Alex Graveley had plans to ask programs if and which files/documents they are showing in their window(s). These windows would then be placed in a separate window list for documents.
If a document is not saved yet, its icon in the window list could be marked with an emblem. This icon could then be dragged into a Nautilus window to save the document.
To avoid drag’n'drop, the icon of the unsaved document could be accompanied by a button called “save here” if a Nautilus window has focus. Pressing that would save the document into the current directory of that Nautilus window.
3 weeks later
Peter: that’s actually a really cool idea…
3 weeks later