Hello, I've read about the spatial view and Thunar at the Thunar Wiki but found that the discussion seemed to end the same polarized like at the gnome project. To me, there is no 'right' way to do it but only a 'good' way for the specific task. Please let me explain:
To me, there are four ways of navigating through the filesystem. The first is the flat bookmarks list, which is only useful for a small handful of direct links to some very important directories. It is already implemented in the gtkfilechooser and in Thunar. The second and the third belong to eachother but projects often try to stick with only one - which hurts the other. The problem here is that many people think of their filesystem only one way. They see it as a large repository or they see it as a kosmos of many different spaces. The people of the first type want the browser view, the people of the second type want the spatial view. To me, there is no way to go in just one of these directions because the filesystem is both a huge repository and a kosmos of very different spaces. The point is that, if you really work on your system, your files can't be arranged in a flat hierarchy. They also can't be linked directly from the Desktop because the icons would overload the display. The spatial view explicitely denies this fact and seems to want you to just delete most of your files or whatever. The silly reorganization stories I've read (even at Thunar Wiki) are fully illusionary and can only be stemmed by people who have very few files compared to real working persons with lots of projects and private stuff and the like. The problem now is that if there is only the spatial view, one has to open a lot of branches and waste space on screen until one is reaching the leaf one is interested in. However, the branches were not of interest at all because they were only needed to reach the leaf. The only neccessary view is the leaf view. The branch views were all redundant. Nautilus has taken this into account and integrated the tree view. People now complain that this breaks the spatial view. Yes, they are right - if, and only if, one wants the spatial view only. Actually, nautilus did right because branches are not leaves. And, the best way to display branches is still the detailed list view because it is quickest and most informative. It is also better readable if one only wants to find the next branch. However, the browser view discriminates leaves by looking at them as it looks at branches. All is displayed the same. It would be better to be able to switch between browser and spatial view by being able to open a leaf in a spatial view, setting this up, and instructing the view to remember the settings. The browser view should obey to this too and open the leaf in the registered spatial view automatically from then on. This way, the user can decide what is a branch and what is a leaf to him. I think, that everybody here on the list has a clear idea of a branch in a filesystem. It is just one of those directories that just leads to the next directories. A leaf is also a directory. It possibly also includes further directories. However, it still represents a kind of step out of the current space and into the next space. Leaf directories are, for example, directories to media files or to comic books or the like. The point with leaves is that they better need a very individual way of treatment. There are only two ways to handle this: One can ignore the fact and just open a spatial view with only the same display options like for branches. One needs to implement a framework that supports external plugins or standards like flash or svg. The plugin strategy is already implemented but plugins don't fall from heaven. Experienced users could help themselves if svg or flash was supported, though. For the developer, this is quite a problematic step because flash is proprietary and for svg there is no usable canvas framework available now. I am not shure if librsvg and cairo can be used together to display an svg image and support mouse and keyboard events. Together with a %(placeholder) that can be placed in attribute values and PCDATA, this could be enough. The placeholder is used to detect the places where directory information is to be dropped in. This way, people could design their own album view or video preview with inkscape, and the spatial view would actually make sense. If plugins are supported, these views could even substitute small applications in full. Coming to the fourth way of using the filesystem. It is a setup on the bookmark view. Even some branches have a special meaning. One could call them entry points or crosspoints. They are very important for the organization of the filesystem hierarchy. However, on a real-life system (not talking about a system for the never-existed dummy average-user evaluated by mediating between all the statistically encountered extremes), there are too many crosspoints to remember them all in a flat bookmark list or as icons on the Desktop. A better strategy would be browsing through them. But then one first had to create a meta-trunk beside the real data-trunk to create categorical directories and lots of links to further such categorical directories with further links to possibly even real files. Maintaining this is a nightmare. And, the links do not tell much. Better would be supporting a .desktop fileview in Thunar and a special directory in $(HOME) where all these .desktop files reside. Each .desktop file is associated with and describes one of those crosspoints. Thunar displays the meta-data stored in the .desktop files like the panel applet chooser displays applets - informative and elegant in a list with an icon and further information per row (file). Thunar should also support creating further such crosspoints. The question is how. Shall the user walk through the branches and select a branch to be included or shall he walk through the list of crosspoints and select a place to insert a new one by selecting a branch in another view or so. A second question is if, in the browser view, crosspoint branches should be opened like leaves - in a spatial .desktop view. Possibly this should be left to the user. Hope you could follow my thoughts, Dennis _______________________________________________ Thunar-dev mailing list [email protected] http://foo-projects.org/mailman/listinfo/thunar-dev
