[Thunar-dev] hello to Thunar-dev!

[Benedikt Meurer]

Foxtrot wrote:
> I have little programming experiences apart from various "Hello
> World"s, but I have been searching for a good learning project for a
> long time (learning not only relating to programming). I have various
> ideas for Thunar, including using the sidebar as both a treeview and a
> tab bar (mostly behavioural, as I was informed in IRC):
> 
> 1) The ability to drag a GtkFileViewer-ish button to the sidebar, and
> that path is made a tab that you can access with one click.

Lets call this 'Shortcuts bar' to avoid confusion with notebook tabs. ;-)

And yes, that was the idea.

> 2) The sidebar is an expandable tree-view without the ugliness of xffm
> (the arrows next to the text). The tree for one node opens as you DnD
> over that node, so you get access to subfolders quickly and easily.

Ack.

> The current GtkFileViewer-layout screenshots look brilliant to me,
> with the inclusion of several optional features such as a location bar
> and a find bar ala Firefox.

Why not an Open Location dialog (like in the mockups) instead of an 
additional, redundante location bar in the UI? While this was mentioned 
quite a few times now, I still fail to see how a location bar together 
with a path bar could improve the usability of a _simple_ file manager.

> The reason I don't want a spatial filemanager is because I found that
> approach highly annoying in Nautilus (too many windows, had to close
> them all the time), and because the behaviour mentioned above along
> with the GtkFileViewer layout would eliminate the need for such a
> feature.

I think we are mostly sure that we won't use a spatial view for Thunar. 
Edscott recently wrote that Xffm 4.4 will have a spatial interface (IIRC 
that was on the Xfce Wiki), so with that UI change for Xffm, we'll have 
a file manager for every need. People that prefer spatial browsing will 
use Xffm, the others will use Thunar.

greets,
Benedikt