On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 09:53:20PM -0400, Robert L Krawitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> people"? The problem (to me, and I daresay to Marc) is very simple --
> there's no obvious way to simply enter a pathname with a simple form
> of completion that's only activated on demand.
Actually, the old file selector didn't just have an entry to type in. As a
matter of fact, most file dialogs I know are very hard and unintuitive to
use, I often end up activating all sorts of things and often have to close
and reopen it to get into a sane state. Most motif programs fall intot hat
category.
Whta made the old dialog so special was that you could just type in paths as
you could elswhere in unix - namely via tab completion.
For example replacing tab by enter completely wrecks this feature, as this
is not at all intuitive, because enter usually means "do it" (either in
the shell or in a dialog), so people are not quick at pressing enter and
using it as a key to press oftentimes slows down considerably.
The thing is, the old dialog had this tremendously great and useful and
fats and efficient (whatever) feature that make it distinct to most other
file dialogs and extremely easy and joyful to use for me and all the
people around me (who incidentally also use a terminal and vim to to most
of their other tasks. Those people are not by any means rare in the unix
world, and making their life worse by making gimp more windows-like in
behaviour (such as the current file dialog does) is imho a very wrong
direction: People are not used to press enter after pathname components,
people are not used to use cursor-down/up to select between components, as
both of those usually destroy what you were typing).
_Everybody_ I showed that tab feature (that they didn't expect in clumsy
graphical programs), wether on trade shows or in private, was immediately
drawn in to how great it was. Similarly to the dynamic keyboard shortcuts
which are not disabled by default.
Those fetaures had definitely a discoverability problem, but the new field
dialog is IMHO worse with respect to discovering those features.
I feel (And judging from the feedback I am not alone) that removing those
features (or making them harder to use) in the name of usability is the
wrong approach. Making everything easy for newbies most often means
making it more difficult for regular users. sometimes you can find a
compromise, such as with the menu bar (again, a discoverability problem),
sometimes you cannot (if tab completion is fundamentally incompatible with
newbie-support). Incidentally, lots of those things have been solved by
supporting both styles and using preferences to switch, and while not a
perfect solution, it might well the achievable optimum.
> using the GIMP altogether for a while; I used Cinepaint or xv (!)
> despite it being obsolete in many ways where I could, and otherwise
> started a new instance of the GIMP each time I had to use it, because
> dealing with the file dialog was so hopeless. Eventually after poking
> around Google I found the ctrl-L hack, but it's still very clumsy
> compared to the simplicity of a text entry box.
This experience is close to mine, and close to the experiences of the people
around me.
It seems sven's standpoint is that this just needs to some more
experience, or learning the new way of using the dialog, but I have to use
those dialogs for quite some time now, and I simply don't believe that
I am too dumb or too stubborn for the new dialog, but that it's simply
slowing me down at best.
> Bookmarks are of no use to me because I have a lot of files that I
> work with whose names I generally know by memory.
[Agree with all of that. The great thing is, however, that bookmarks don't
seem to collide with a text entry, so one could have both, which is just
great, and a win-win situation].
> Anyone who tells me that I should organize my files differently
> will be told (politely or otherwise) to fsck off.
The irony is that one gets told that the old way would be somehow inferior
without any evidence and lots of evidence to the contrary. It's new and
completely different, so it must be better.
> frankly I can't believe what I see there (e. g. file dialogs should go
> away, and everything should be done through the file manager or some
> such). This is design for its own sake rather than design for what's
> actually usable.
A lot of people feel that way.
> I have half a mind to do a fork of GTK+ just to fix the file dialog.
> This would really be an insane thing for me to do.
Yes, it would :( It's a waste of time.
--
The choice of a
-----==- _GNU_
----==-- _ generation Marc Lehmann
---==---(_)__ __ ____ __ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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-=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ XX11-RIPE
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