[Thunar-dev] Virtual root node

[Benedikt Meurer]

Biju Chacko wrote:
>> I came across this question yesterday evening:
>>
>> Should we have a virtual root node like `Computer' (Gnome) or 
>> something like that? So all other nodes (Filesystem, Home, Removable 
>> Media) are children of that node.
>>
>> The reasons leading to this:
>>
>>  1) With the current design ideas, we have a special URI media type 
>> 'home://' that refers to files belows the users home directory. And 
>> going `Up' from 'home://' should not be possible (atleast it should 
>> not jump to 'file:///usr/home' then). But not being able to go `Up' 
>> from $HOME is a bit too restrictive and not very easy.
>>
>>  2) Having 3 or 4 toplevel root nodes in a treepane seems to be very 
>> uncommon for a software that handles files/directories. A single root 
>> node seems to be the common case here (e.g. `Computer' in Gnome, 
>> `Desktop' in Windows, `/' in KDE, ...).
>>
>> Opinions?
> 
> 
> If you run nautilus --browser, the treeview has two toplevel nodes: Home 
> and Filesystem. That seems fairly reasonable.
> 
> I really don't see the need for a special 'home://' URI. What's wrong 
> with 'file://'? IAC, in the default view you won't be showing the URI 
> will you?

If you have a separate 'Home' branch in the treeview (and thereby in the 
overall file manager) it makes it more logical to have a different URI 
scheme (because else you have various URIs that aren't unique, but refer 
to different locations in the tree).

> -- b

Benedikt