On Fri, Jul 16, 2004 at 07:40:33AM +0200, Magnus Therning wrote: > Personally I can never understand the idea of looking at inferior, > but more widely used, systems and copy their behaviour. Why not > acknowledge the grand history of Unix (tab-completion is part of it) > and leverage it?
Just for correctness' sake, "Unix" doesn't have a grand history of tab-completion, at least not in the context we are talking about here. Sven correctly argues that GNOME introduces an inconsistent user experience (you have tab completion in a lot of places -- e.g. programs using readline and many editors -- but in GNOME), but what you call "Unix history" is more like "GNU tradition". Unix vendors rarely provided this sort of feature (an in those cases where they did provide it it was disabled by default). They do provide other nice things. In this context IRIX's Open File Dialog comes to mind. It's amazingly irritating from a usability POV, _but_ it has this nice detail: the path you type gets "buttons" associated with it. If you type "/some/random/path", there are two small widgets which take you to "/some" and "/some/random". But then again, this goes against (or doesn't mesh well with) the current GNOME "shallow is better" way of thinking. But I disgres, Marcelo
