[Thunar-dev] Spatial or not-spatial?

[Benedikt Meurer]

After some talk on IRC with some of you, I have been thinking about the 
possibility to use a spatial user interface for Thunar.

My initial intention was to use a browser-like user interface for 
Thunar, basicly because I always thought the browser-like UI would be 
somewhat easier and more intuitive. But it turned that this myth was 
solely based on my ignorance, and not any real experience. So, in the 
end, I realized for myself, that it wasn't the file manager that caused 
trouble, but it was my mind that caused the problem.

And thats exactly the problem. Fixing software is easy, but fixing 
peoples minds is a hard job (probably impossible).

So, what do you think:

(a) Better for Xfce to ship an old-school file manager to make existing 
users happy.
(b) Better have a simple file manager to attract new users, but probably 
frustrate existing users.

I collected some thoughts already:
http://thunar.xfce.org/wiki/ui:spatial

The spatial prototype is available from CVS, if you don't have CVS, a 
recent snapshot is available from 
http://www.xfce.org/~benny/trials/thunar-spatial-20050221-2.tar.gz 
(IconView is only available with latest libexo-0.3 from SubVersion 
repository).

Jasper suggested to do a poll and ask existing Xfce users.

Opinions?

greets,
Benedikt

-- 
Xfce  --  small, stable, fast  --  http://www.xfce.org/

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