User interface for the new file manager

[Benedikt Meurer]

Hello everybody,

As some of you might already know, work was started on an alternative 
file manager for Xfce 4.4.0, named Thunar. We have been discussing the 
user interface for Thunar during the last two/three weeks. The result of 
this discussion is available at (short summary, see the mailinglist 
archives for details):

http://thunar.xfce.org/wiki/ui:suggestion-20050320

Since we've made good progress on the UI and a decision on the basic UI 
direction will take place in the not so far future, I wanted to get some 
more feedback from the other Xfce users, that did not raise their voice 
on thunar-dev yet.

Note that we're just discussion the basic UI direction currently (as 
that's very important to decide before you start to design the 
architecture of the file manager); so please don't concentrate on 
implementation details in your comments, but instead, comment on the 
basic UI direction.

 From the 4 layouts shown on the summary page, only the first two are 
considered important, because that seems to be the way users want to 
interact with a file manager, where the second layout is probably used 
mostly by advanced users or users that have used Windows Explorer or 
Konqueror before. The first layout is based on the GtkFileChooser design 
in Gtk 2.4 and above.

Comments please.

greets,
Benedikt

PS: YES, development on Xffm 4.4 continues. And with Xffm switching to 
the spatial view (Edscott, correct me if I'm wrong, but I read that in a 
Wiki comment by you) and Thunar using the navigational view, we'll one 
file manager that follows the browser paradigm and one file manager that 
follows the spatial paradigm, so whatever you prefer, Xfce will offer a 
file manager for you. ;-)

PPS: Please remember that Thunar's focus is on simplicity and ease of 
use if you want to suggest another feature.