I just restarted to use Linux after 6 years of pause caused by a total frustration w/r to the ease-of-use and standard apps availability, and i must say that what i have today on my desktop *and working* is a far cry from what i used to have 6 years ago: Skype, a working and well-integrated OOo, Anjuta, gAIM, GIMP, genuine Acroreader (in syncwith the latest win versions), Real Player, MPlayer, a fully functional (Mozilla) browser, etc; and last but not least an *easy to use and working Nautilus*. And this brings me to the reason for which i took my time to write this message: there are just a few more things to do to make Nautilus become a really cool "explorer" alternative (and i'll start in the order of priorities, based on what can easily be dowloaded as separate packages vs what i couldn't find on the net at all):
1) Shortcuts. I think this is EXTREMELY important, since what the "Link" menu item generates is not very usefull: for example, if i make a link on the desktop to an "index.html" file residing in a folder, then after opening the file (say in mozilla) any local link in the "index.html" will nolonger work since the browser opened the file in the directory where the link is located and not in the directory where the "index.html" file is actually located. Same goes (as yet another example) for an acrobat "table.pdf" file: once i link to it and open it in acroreader, any link in the table.pdf file will not work since acroread uses as working directory the one where the link is located rather than the one where the actual "table.pdf" file is located. THE COOL THING is that it's probably very easy to patch this, as RIGHT NOW, if i drag-drop a file to a panel, a "real" shortcut is created on the panel, and if i copy that shortcut on -say- the desktop, voila, i have a "real" shortcut. In terms of GUI it's again very simple to integrate elegantly, just add a "Shortcut" item in the already existing "Copy/Move/Link" pop-up that apears when SHIFT-dragging a file 2) "Open with" right-click menu for folders. There already exists a package that adds this functionality to nautilus and it works just fine, it's just that i belive it should be there in the first place (one thing that the package does not do is to add the custom commands in the tree-view on the left Nautilus pane, so i could only add a right-click "search in folder" (or "open terminal here" etc) command when clicking on the right window pane... 3) Editable GNOME menu There already exist packages that do this, but they i could only find perl (or the like) scripts, and since i like to keep my installation as mnimal as possible i didn't install perl (and don't plan to) so it won't work. If it could be integrated in the native nautilus code it'd be great... To rise, (2) and (3) are "nice to have", but (1) is -in my opinion- a MUST HAVE in terms of usability All the very best and good luck! [A new GNOME fan and very noisy advocate :-)] -- ___________________________________________________ Play 100s of games for FREE! http://games.mail.com/ -- nautilus-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list
