[Thunar-dev] [Usability] Proposed simplifications

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> whistler at fnord.ch wrote:
> 
>>>>Hm, somehow I think, there's a difference between navigating the file
>>>>system and acting on the file system. Action happens in the main view,
>>>>navigation *can* happen in the main view, but it will most often happen
>>>>in the pure navigational components (favourites pane, tree pane,
>>>>location bar, location dialog/entry, ...).
>>>>
>>>>Or do I miss a point here?
>>>
>>>I don't think that the shotcut/favourites/bookmark pane counts as a 
>>>full fledged
>>>navigational component. It allows you to jump to a certain point in the
>>>filesystem hierarchy, but afterwards you have to use some of the other
>>>navigational components (the tree pane, location bar/dialog/entry)).
>>>
>>>In the current implementation, however, you cannot use this combination.
>>
>>Of course the tree-view-pane would have to implement the same file 
>>manipulation
>>capabilities as the list view and the icon view. OS X has something similar,
>>though they don't show the shortcut pane while the tree view is active, I
>>think.
> 
> 
> Dunno. People requested the Window Explorer like tree-navigation in the 
> sidepane several times. And I know quite a few people that complained 
> about the missing side-tree in xffm several times (xffm has two 
> independent tree panes).
> 
> We could add a main tree view later (if necessary). It doesn't fit the 
> current design either, where the ThunarListModel is actually a list 
> representation of a folder, rather than a tree (that could be changed of 
> course).
> 
> I kinda understand your point, but experience tells me that this is not 
> the way most people will want to interact with Thunar. I'd like to hear 
> how the others think about this topic.
> 

I fully agree with you. It's a totally different concept (show 
everything in one view vs. show one directory at the time) and I don't 
think we should offer too many different views; for the same reason I 
would also oppose a column view, even though it is a cool concept.

Additionally, having only one folder in a view probably possibly allows 
for optimizations in the code that are not possible otherwise, but 
that's pure speculation.

	Jasper