[Thunar-dev] Feature request optional dual pane view modeand other requests

[Kevin Olemoh]

It seems that there is already a bug request related to the mouse hover
issue so I won't bother to file a dup its bug number 1509 in case you were
not aware.  Also there would only be two functions for either mouse button
with respect to commander style mouse selection not three all its really
doing is taking the functionality of ctrl+click the context menu if handled
by a time based setting the effect is just like that of settings that
control the amount of time one has to hover over a window before focus is
given to a window when one use mouse gives focus settings in various wm's or
DE's.  One other way one could handle such a setting is to map the context
menu popup to ctrl+click so that one need not deal with any time based
setting for the mouse button assign to tagging files.

As far as my first idea think of it like this say you have one directory
with a bunch of files in it  and you want to move groups of those files to
different places on a drive or even different network locations.  Think
about what you have to do with most conventional non commander style file
managers:

1. Select group of files then either:
A. Dive through your directory tree to the destination directory which can
become a real pain if its more than five levels deep.  Keep in mind that if
you are using a sinlge window you won't be able to see which files you
selected to begin with making it entirely possible that you actually forget
what it was that you selected in the first place.
B. Open a totally seperate instance of the file manager and then move to the
desired destination. [Waste of screen real estate to juggle two windows of
the same program given that it is wholly concievable that one wants to see
both the source directory and the destination directory at the same time.]

2. Finally perform your move/copy operation.

With a dual pane mnuemonic you cut out the need to crack open a second
instance and allow the user to instantly survey source and destination
directories whenever one needs to see them.  I probably should have brought
up better examples of dual pane file managers that more properly handle
single pane and dual pane mnuemonics in my first email I appologize.  One
possible solution is to allow the program to split the window with the use
of a hotkey like Freecommander does it allows one to maximize either the
left or right pane so that only one ends up being visible just like with a
single pane file manager and then split the window when one needs to perform
complex move/copy operations. [which can even include archive extraction if
the program supports viewing files inside compressed archives.]  The amount
of possible confusion is really minimal and the increase in overall
effectiveness of the program when trying to handle semi complex to complex
copy/move operations far out way the danger of confusion.

The most confusing aspect of the dual pane mnuemonic is how to make sure the
user knows which directory the end user is actually looking at at all times
Konqueror fails at this because it keeps the location bar unified and
changes the text of the location bar based on which panel has focus.  The
common answer to this issue seems to be to create two location bars one for
each panel.  I do think its a better solution to put the paths in the status
bar at the bottom of the window or even to put them in the very top off to
the side in the bar that contains the file, help and view menus.  It would
look fairly clean if one decides to hide the location selector.

I couldn't find the discussion relating to the the terminal in the mailing
list archive.could you point me to it?

Other things I thought of since my last email:

1. Treating archives like a virtual filesystem [IE. when you click on them
the archive gets treated like a directory.] without the need for a seperate
program (I'm aware of the plan to integrate xarchiver and thunar but I think
that its a bit supurfluous if the fm can support archives directly.) coupled
with dual pane this sort of thing makes extracting archives far more
convinient.

2. The ability to assign hotkeys to folder bookmarks so that using the
hotkey takes one directly to the folder assigned to the key.
3. The ability to hide the side pane
4. I think it would be a good idea to be able to drag files over to a
bookmark in the side pane and have the folder open up in the window at the
right or to allow te file being dragged to be moved to the directory
referenced by the bookmark. [Yea I know I could use the folder tree in the
side pane but its not so great because the folders I would use this feature
on have somewhat long directory names and often on totally seperate drives
making navigating to them that way overly cumbersome.)
5. As an outgrowth of the pattern selection option[Which is an excellent
feature and whoever thought of it is a friggin genius!] it would be good to
be able to filter files based on patterns so that only files matching the
pattern are visible for as long as the filter is applied.
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