Desktop icon grid

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:09:15 +0200
Harald Judt <h.judt at gmx.at> wrote:

> Am 28.09.2011 16:38, schrieb Jannis Pohlmann:
> > On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:20:58 +0200
> > Harald Judt<h.judt at gmx.at>  wrote:
> >
> >> Am 28.09.2011 14:29, schrieb Nick Schermer:
> >>> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Stealth<stealth at xfce.org>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> >>>> Hash: SHA1
> >>>>
> >>>> Hello, I was wanting to make the desktop icons move around
> >>>> "freely" and not snap to a grid. I'm sending this to make sure
> >>>> its not already been/being implemented (and to get some info if
> >>>> its not being implemented)
> >>>
> >>> FYI: http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.10/roadmap/xfdesktop
> >>>
> >>> Nick
> >>
> >> After reading that page, I stumbled over 'Improve Responsiveness of
> >> File Operations'. The paragraph talks about the deletion/copy/move,
> >> but I noticed that thunar became less responsive for the
> >> copy/move/whatever dialog too (progress information/time
> >> estimation). If you're shoving files over a slow net connection,
> >> thunar freezes up sometimes which is especially bad when it's
> >> running as a daemon. Are there any plans to restore the
> >> responsiveness for these things too?
> >
> > Remember that transferring files over the network wasn't really
> > possible with earlier versions of Thunar (unless you used something
> > like FUSE or NFS of course). Also, I doubt the dialog "freezes".
> > File operations are implemented asynchronously, so your dialog
> > probably just isn't updated as frequently as you'd expect it to.
> 
> Actually I'm still using FUSE (namely, sshfs-fuse), but it also lags 
> with CIFS, and I've already seen thunar working faster with USB 
> transfers too. I find it more convenient, as I can set it up 
> automatically depending on the network environment and use it on the 
> command line too.
> 
> It's not the dialog that "freezes", but rather the whole thunar 
> instance. "Freezes" might be the wrong word, so let's just say that
> it reacts very very slow and does not repaint often enough.
> 
> >> I'm really missing the almost-instant responsiveness of the time
> >> estimation dialog of pre-gvfs-thunar, now it only updates every few
> >> seconds if everything goes well.
> >
> > Thunar updates the dialog whenever a certain small percentage of the
> > total transfer amount has been copied or moved since the previous
> > update. I felt like such a time frame was necessary to not cause
> > 50% of CPU usage (caused by updating the dialog whenever a few
> > bytes have been transfered) when running multiple operations at the
> > same time. With very slow drives or network connections this will
> > of course make the dialog feel less responsive.
> 
> I never experienced that high cpu usage, but then I have never
> started that many parallel operations. BTW: Windows 8 will have a
> great feature, allowing you to queue, pause and resume file
> operations. I think I saw such similar ideas here on the mailing list
> quite some time ago, but it never made it into the final version.

GIOs high-level APIs don't support pausing in the middle of a file.
IMHO this is too much of an advanced feature for thunar. It'll
complicate the transfer operations code and progress dialog quite 
a bit.

> Is it possible to reduce that time frame somewhere and improve 
> responsiveness somehow? CPU load is not a problem for me,
> responsiveness is. I'd like to have a desktop that is snappy, not
> laggy, even if the throughput suffers a bit ;-)

Nope, it's currently not possible to change this. We could go back to
not ignoring updates at all even if the progress is minimal. I'm not
sure that would be a good decision though.

  - Jannis