[Thunar-dev] Minor things part $PREVIOUS++ | And on the nature of click-drag selection in list/detail view.

[Benedikt Meurer]

Sebastian wrote:
>>Guys, I think you are confusing the cursor with the selection. When
>>deleting an item from the icon view, the cursor (if set) will be placed
>>on the next item (or if there's no next item, on the prev item). The
>>next item won't be selected, but it will have the keyboard focus. So
>>keyboard navigation works perfectly here.
> 
> I'm not sure I follow. When I delete an item in either list or or icon 
> view and then press an arrow key, it starts from the beginning again. 
> I'm not sure what you mean by cursor... You say 'if set'. How does one 
> set the cursor? Would that be the dotted line around the files? If I 
> click on the file with the mouse, no dotted line. If I use the arrow 
> keys there is now a dotted line. But still when I delete something the 
> dotted line disappears and pressing an arrow key starts from the 
> beginning... is there something I'm not getting?

The "cursor item" in the icon view (and also the tree/list view) is the
item which has the keyboard focus. The dotted line around the item is
not always shown (the exact conditions when this line should be shown
were adopted from GtkTreeView, don't ask me...). There can be no "cursor
item" at all, which means that the first arrow key press will start at
the first item, which then becomes the "cursor item". Now for
GtkTreeView, when the row for the "cursor item" is deleted from the
model, the "cursor item" will be unset. This was also the case for
ExoIconView until recently. What ExoIconView does now is to check if the
"cursor item" is about to be deleted and if so, move the "cursor item"
to the next row in the model. If no such row exists, it tries to move it
to the previous. If no previous exists, the model is empty and so the
"cursor item" is unset.

> While I'm at it, another question. Will it ever be possible to use the 
> mouse to click-drag select multiple files via list view? It seems right 
> now like it isn't designed for this, but I wonder why... I suppose if 
> designed for this, then to select a single file you'd need to  click 
> over the actual text instead of anywhere along the row. But doesn't this 
> also give the advantage of being able to right-click without selecting 
> the file, and thus perform an action (like making a new folder) on the 
> current directory instead of the selected file? Right now you can only 
> access the current directory right-click menu if the directory has empty 
> space to right-click in, which it does not if it is full of files. So 
> then you must access these things by the file/edit/view menus or 
> keyboard shortcuts. Not impossible to deal with, if this is how you want 
> it, just wondering.

You can click-drag select multiple files in the list view.

Is it possible that you're using really old versions of Thunar and libexo?

Benedikt