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

[Benedikt Meurer]

Kevin Olemoh wrote:
> 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.

Ah, yes, right.

> 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.

The problem is: The right mouse button in Thunar has already two
functions, context menu and drag start.

> 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.]

You can also just Copy/Cut the selected files and Paste it into the
target folder, without having to open a new window or support tabs.

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

A search for "thunar-dev"+tabs on google should bring up the threads.

> 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.

Also discussed, maybe for a 2.0.

> 2. The ability to assign hotkeys to folder bookmarks so that using the
> hotkey takes one directly to the folder assigned to the key.

Not possible with the current .gtk-bookmarks solution, maybe with the
new desktop bookmark standard.

> 3. The ability to hide the side pane

Ctrl+B/Ctrl+T/F9

> 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.)

There's a patch for this in the "Some minor thingies..." thread. Read
the thread and you'll see why this wasn't applied. If you can figure out
the legal stuff, I'll apply it.

> 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.

Yep, I already thought of this. Maybe for 2.0. You can file a bug report
to remind me of this.

Benedikt

PS: With all the recent feature requests, I'd really like to remind
everybody that we're preparing for a BETA and its time for stabilization
now. Also, keep in mind that some of these features are really heavy and
will definitely turn Thunar into Nautilus/Konqueror/ROX wrt to bad
performance and bad usability.