[Thunar-dev] reentrance to the spatial view discussion

[Dennis Heuer]

Hello,

I've read about the spatial view and Thunar at the Thunar Wiki but
found that the discussion seemed to end the same polarized like at the
gnome project. To me, there is no 'right' way to do it but only a
'good' way for the specific task. Please let me explain:

To me, there are four ways of navigating through the filesystem. The
first is the flat bookmarks list, which is only useful for a small
handful of direct links to some very important directories. It is
already implemented in the gtkfilechooser and in Thunar.

The second and the third belong to eachother but projects often try
to stick with only one - which hurts the other. The problem here is that
many people think of their filesystem only one way. They see it as a
large repository or they see it as a kosmos of many different spaces.
The people of the first type want the browser view, the people of the
second type want the spatial view. To me, there is no way to go in just
one of these directions because the filesystem is both a huge
repository and a kosmos of very different spaces.

The point is that, if you really work on your system, your files can't
be arranged in a flat hierarchy. They also can't be linked directly
from the Desktop because the icons would overload the display. The
spatial view explicitely denies this fact and seems to want you to
just delete most of your files or whatever. The silly reorganization
stories I've read (even at Thunar Wiki) are fully illusionary and can
only be stemmed by people who have very few files compared to real
working persons with lots of projects and private stuff and the like.
The problem now is that if there is only the spatial view, one has to
open a lot of branches and waste space on screen until one is reaching
the leaf one is interested in. However, the branches were not of
interest at all because they were only needed to reach the leaf. The
only neccessary view is the leaf view. The branch views were all
redundant.

Nautilus has taken this into account and integrated the tree view.
People now complain that this breaks the spatial view. Yes, they are
right - if, and only if, one wants the spatial view only. Actually,
nautilus did right because branches are not leaves. And, the best way
to display branches is still the detailed list view because it is
quickest and most informative. It is also better readable if one only
wants to find the next branch.

However, the browser view discriminates leaves by looking at them as
it looks at branches. All is displayed the same. It would be better to
be able to switch between browser and spatial view by being able to
open a leaf in a spatial view, setting this up, and instructing the view
to remember the settings. The browser view should obey to this too and
open the leaf in the registered spatial view automatically from then
on. This way, the user can decide what is a branch and what is a leaf
to him.

I think, that everybody here on the list has a clear idea of a branch
in a filesystem. It is just one of those directories that just leads to
the next directories. A leaf is also a directory. It possibly also
includes further directories. However, it still represents a kind of
step out of the current space and into the next space. Leaf directories
are, for example, directories to media files or to comic books or the
like.

The point with leaves is that they better need a very individual way of
treatment. There are only two ways to handle this:

One can ignore the fact and just open a spatial view with only the same
display options like for branches.

One needs to implement a framework that supports external plugins or
standards like flash or svg.

The plugin strategy is already implemented but plugins don't fall from
heaven. Experienced users could help themselves if svg or flash was
supported, though. For the developer, this is quite a problematic step
because flash is proprietary and for svg there is no usable canvas
framework available now. I am not shure if librsvg and cairo can be
used together to display an svg image and support mouse and keyboard
events. Together with a %(placeholder) that can be placed in attribute
values and PCDATA, this could be enough. The placeholder is used to
detect the places where directory information is to be dropped in.

This way, people could design their own album view or video preview
with inkscape, and the spatial view would actually make sense. If
plugins are supported, these views could even substitute small
applications in full.

Coming to the fourth way of using the filesystem. It is a setup on the
bookmark view. Even some branches have a special meaning. One could
call them entry points or crosspoints. They are very important for the
organization of the filesystem hierarchy. However, on a real-life
system (not talking about a system for the never-existed dummy
average-user evaluated by mediating between all the statistically
encountered extremes), there are too many crosspoints to remember them
all in a flat bookmark list or as icons on the Desktop. A better
strategy would be browsing through them. But then one first had to
create a meta-trunk beside the real data-trunk to create categorical
directories and lots of links to further such categorical directories
with further links to possibly even real files. Maintaining this is a
nightmare. And, the links do not tell much.

Better would be supporting a .desktop fileview in Thunar and a special
directory in $(HOME) where all these .desktop files reside.
Each .desktop file is associated with and describes one of those
crosspoints. Thunar displays the meta-data stored in the .desktop files
like the panel applet chooser displays applets - informative and
elegant in a list with an icon and further information per row (file).

Thunar should also support creating further such crosspoints. The
question is how. Shall the user walk through the branches and select a
branch to be included or shall he walk through the list of crosspoints
and select a place to insert a new one by selecting a branch in another
view or so. A second question is if, in the browser view, crosspoint
branches should be opened like leaves - in a spatial .desktop view.
Possibly this should be left to the user.

Hope you could follow my thoughts,
Dennis