[Thunar-dev] Virtual root node

[Biju Chacko]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> 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).

It may be logical, but I think it's not very useful. Why should the user 
  have to learn another URI scheme? I'm not sure what can be achieved by 
it that can't be achieved by being able to set arbitrary locations as 
the root of the current treeview.

-- b