[Thunar-dev] Spatial or not-spatial?

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:
...
> 
> Oliver (my boss) made an interesting point recently about the file 
> manager design:
> 
> Imagine the WWW, its hierarchically by design:
> 
>  org
>   |- xfce
>   |   |- thunar
>   |   |   | - /wiki
>   |   |   |    | - /dokuwiki.php
>   |....
>   |- gnu
>   | ....
>  ....
> 
> and so on. Many people tend to think of the WWW organization as a 
> complex graph, but if you think twice, you'll discover, that it's really 
> just a simple tree (with *lots* of nodes).
> 
> Now, if you are looking for information, e.g. you are looking for 
> information about 'graphical file managers for Unix', then you could of 
> course traverse the `WWW tree' to search for matching documents. But 
> nobody would do that - really, ask yourself. :-) Instead you'll most 
> probably query google (or msn, or whatever) and check the results.
> 
> The question is: Why? The WWW is organized as a tree, why not traverse it?
> 
> The answer is simple: It takes too much time, because there are too many 
> nodes. Thats why you'd use a query-interface, rather than the 
> tree-interface.
> 
> So, lets have a look at or file system. Of course, nobody has the WWW on 
> his file system at home - "has anybody seen my internet backup?" - but 
> the amount of data on home desktops is ever growing, with no end in 
> sight. And the answer most people gave me here recently is that you need 
> the tree-interface to master this amount of data.
> 
> Hm, ok, lets recall, for the WWW you use the query-interface because 
> thats the way to master a huge amount of data, but for your file system 
> you use the tree-interface because that's the only way to master a huge 
> amount of data - btw, to make sure nobody gets stuck on the terminology: 
> "data" = information, no matter if that information is presented by 
> local files, by static html page, by table rows in databases, etc.
> 
> That doesn't make sense on the long-run (in *my very own* opinion). 
> Instead it sounds like some old bad habit that doesn't want to die yet.
> 

That's a nice analogy and I fully agree. It's also why I asked Eduard to 
write the appfinder as well, to have a searchable interface, instead of 
a tree.

So that's for viewing (and finding) files, but as long as we have a 
hierarchical file system it is very difficult to implement storing data 
(moving or copying files) in a similar manner. Maybe have 'Copy 
to'/'Move to' actions that simply open a gtk save dialog ;-) Nah, let's 
have navigational view with good searching abilities for a start. I think...

	Jasper