As far as my first idea think of it like this say you have one directory with a bunch of files in it and you want to move groups of those files to different places on a drive or even different network locations. Think about what you have to do with most conventional non commander style file managers:
1. Select group of files then either:
A. Dive through your directory tree to the destination directory which can become a real pain if its more than five levels deep. Keep in mind that if you are using a sinlge window you won't be able to see which files you selected to begin with making it entirely possible that you actually forget what it was that you selected in the first place.
B. Open a totally seperate instance of the file manager and then move to the desired destination. [Waste of screen real estate to juggle two windows of the same program given that it is wholly concievable that one wants to see both the source directory and the destination directory at the same time.]
2. Finally perform your move/copy operation.
With a dual pane mnuemonic you cut out the need to crack open a second instance and allow the user to instantly survey source and destination directories whenever one needs to see them. I probably should have brought up better examples of dual pane file managers that more properly handle single pane and dual pane mnuemonics in my first email I appologize. One possible solution is to allow the program to split the window with the use of a hotkey like Freecommander does it allows one to maximize either the left or right pane so that only one ends up being visible just like with a single pane file manager and then split the window when one needs to perform complex move/copy operations. [which can even include archive extraction if the program supports viewing files inside compressed archives.] The amount of possible confusion is really minimal and the increase in overall effectiveness of the program when trying to handle semi complex to complex copy/move operations far out way the danger of confusion.
The most confusing aspect of the dual pane mnuemonic is how to make sure the user knows which directory the end user is actually looking at at all times Konqueror fails at this because it keeps the location bar unified and changes the text of the location bar based on which panel has focus. The common answer to this issue seems to be to create two location bars one for each panel. I do think its a better solution to put the paths in the status bar at the bottom of the window or even to put them in the very top off to the side in the bar that contains the file, help and view menus. It would look fairly clean if one decides to hide the location selector.
I couldn't find the discussion relating to the the terminal in the mailing list archive.could you point me to it?
Other things I thought of since my last email:
1. Treating archives like a virtual filesystem [IE. when you click on them the archive gets treated like a directory.] without the need for a seperate program (I'm aware of the plan to integrate xarchiver and thunar but I think that its a bit supurfluous if the fm can support archives directly.) coupled with dual pane this sort of thing makes extracting archives far more convinient.
2. The ability to assign hotkeys to folder bookmarks so that using the hotkey takes one directly to the folder assigned to the key.
3. The ability to hide the side pane
4. I think it would be a good idea to be able to drag files over to a bookmark in the side pane and have the folder open up in the window at the right or to allow te file being dragged to be moved to the directory referenced by the bookmark. [Yea I know I could use the folder tree in the side pane but its not so great because the folders I would use this feature on have somewhat long directory names and often on totally seperate drives making navigating to them that way overly cumbersome.)
5. As an outgrowth of the pattern selection option[Which is an excellent feature and whoever thought of it is a friggin genius!] it would be good to be able to filter files based on patterns so that only files matching the pattern are visible for as long as the filter is applied.
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