[Thunar-dev] Thunar User Interface

[Benedikt Meurer]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> Hm, shrinking the dialog the way you suggested looks odd. I agree with 
> you that the sgid, suid and sticky stuff does not need to be visible by 
> default. Perhaps you could get your hands on ThunarPropertiesDialog.py? ;-)

While we are talking about removing seldomly used controls from the main 
UI: Have you had a look at the Windows Explorer File Properties dialog yet?

  http://thunar.xfce.org/wiki/ui:file-properties-dialog#windows_explorer

Its interesting to have the MIME type and MIME application in the same 
tab, and the actual application selection in a different dialog. Somehow 
I think this looks even cleaner than the Nautilus approach of putting it 
in a different tab. Especially, it hides (nearly) all details of the 
MIME system from the user, since from the users point of view, there's 
no mention of a MIME system and instead, the user just changes the 
application to use for a given file (and thereby implicitly - just like 
the user would expect - for all other files of the same type), but that 
little detail is hidden from the default dialog.

What confuses me is that Konqueror does very similar, but I think its 
less intuitive than the Windows Explorer, but that may be due to the 
fact that

  a) the General tab looks very busy (to quote botsie)
  b) Konqueror has two fields 'Type:' and 'Contents:', which causes 
quite some confusion
  c) In Konqueror its not obvious what the preferences button does, 
since there's no mention of an `Open with' or `Application' in the 
dialog, instead the button is on the same line as the MIME type 
description, which makes it even worse IMHO.

So, how about adopting that idea from Window Explorer for the MIME 
application handling instead of adopting the handling from Nautilus? 
Opinions? Ideas?

Benedikt