I've been thinking about the two panel interface since the question came up a few months ago and I have a few thoughts on the issue. (There was a bug report around somewhere.)
I assumed the question had already been largely answered with the recommendation to "provide a clean patch the Nautilus developers can easily maintain". I thought the nautilus developers had made it pretty clear they were not going to implement the request but at the time there didn't seem to be any objection to making it possible if was done in a clean and managable way. Rather than trying to add this functionality to Nautilus it might be easier to seek out alternatives. In case anyone was not already aware gftp has a "Commander" two panel style interface can be used to view two local drives at once. http://gftp.seul.org/ I've requested they turn this on by default instead of leaving one side empty until the user chooses to connect somewhere, although gftp developement seems to be relatively slow at the moment. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330418 PCMan looks like an interesting project http://gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=1263 It doesn't have the commander two panel style interface but it does offer a tabbed file manager. (I like the attention to detail, by choosing the label "A_ddress" for the location bar it can have the same Alt+D keybinding users expect from Microsoft Explorer and Internet explorer) On Wed, 8 Feb 2006, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: > > I agree, it's not a Nautilus specific problem, I think web browsers > > suffered from the same problem until they started using tabs. > > Web browsers have never suffered from this problem, never say never > because hardly any Web pages support external drag-and-drop, I loved how Internet Explorer on Mac allowed you to drag an image from a web page to your desktop. The Microsoft Macintosh developers knew their stuff. (Epiphany may also have offered this but I'm not sure.) > except for dragging text into text fields. (In theory you could drop > files into <input type="file"> controls, but Gecko doesn't support that > yet.) So there's been even less reason to have tiled browser windows > than there is to have tiled word processor windows, and much less reason > than there is to have tiled Nautilus windows. Again, tabs aren't > relevant here. A web browser developed in Ireland called "Tablane" has taken the idea of Tabs and split windows a little futher and presented it as a big selling point. http://www.tablane.com/ This isn't a brilliantly new idea or anything, I'm sure it was obvious to many people as soon as frames were designed (or even earlier). I previously wrote some javascript to generate a frameset and present two page sides by side for comparison but taking the idea and making it into something convincingly useful is much harder (like so many ideas we discuss). For my simple hack see "Javascript - Better Split" http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~horkana/dev/javascript/ The KDE file manager and web browser - Konqueror - has long allowed you to have the split windows. This feature can be used in the web browser too and it was certainly the first web browser I ever saw do this trick but I think it was due due to a lucky crossover of the feature from the file manager more than any kind of a well planned feature. > > I believe most would agree that tabs in web browsers and text editors > > have many advantages. Would tabs not bring the same benefits to > > nautilus ? > > The main reason for tabs in Web browsers seems to be that the Web is > hideously slow, so people want to open pages in the background. Agreed. It also wasnt just the web but also the web browser, as Mozilla was far slower to open a whole new window than to open a new tab. I'm sure Firefox is slower to open a new window than to open a new tab but with faster computers the difference isn't so noticable anymore. Sure there are some benefits to Tabs reinventing the window manager inside the browser but speed was always been the primary reason for tabs in Mozilla. > > if you could drag and drop files to tabs, as in firefox for example. I didn't realise the tab head was a drag target until you mentioned it. > > The tabs themselves are always visible and never overlap, even if only > > the contents of the selected tab are visible. > > Where tiled windows had usefulness n, a tabbed window would have > usefulness a bit over sqrt(n), because you couldn't easily see or drag > to the subfolders of the folders the tabs represented. > > Mac OS 8 and 9 let you drag folder windows to become permanent tabs at > the bottom of the screen, that would pop up immediately when you > dragged to them. > <http://edtech.sandi.net/presentations/os8/wn/wneou/wneou.html> Oh, button views! A far better way to present a single click interface if you ask me (but you didn't, look how easily distracted I get). > > I'm sorry if tabs are not relevant to this thread, perhaps I should > > have started a new thread ? > Probably. :-) I think there are enough examples of the two panel view to show it can work. The only questions left are who will implement the idea and who will maintain it. This is why started by saying I thought the question has been answered already and unless the Nautilus developer say otherwise I assume they will not be implmenting the suggestion but would be willing to accept a patch which made it possible without adding too much of a maintaince burdern for them. Best of Luck Sincerely Alan Horkan Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
