Split-panes in Thunar.

[Steve Dodier-Lazaro]

Hi everyone,

I think Nick's firm opinion about the relative value of split panes is
maybe not so immediately understood. I think a prime goal of Xfce is
that interacting with the Xfce software should be simple. You should
be able to learn what it does easily, and to know how to operate it
easily. A lot of what Xfce is has been iteratively developed, well,
very much like developers do: by writing code, testing it, getting bug
reports and improving things.

Now, this process means that radical changes can have radically
negative effects on users who may not understand the changes, have
their own ways of working disturbed or even prevented, and who may
generally not have needs for something new. That's why if you want to
make large-scale changes to how Xfce changes, it would be a good idea
to:

1) ensure that you do not degrade the existing user experience of the
existing Xfce users
2) create something that behaves and feel consistent with the rest of Xfce

It's not so easy to reach those goals since we have very limited
design resources, in particular we can't get every UI/UX patch through
proper user testing.

I would personally probably very much enjoy to use split panes, but I
would like to know if it will do me more good than harm and if I can
use it enjoyably. I think you should sit down and define in a document
how it should behave, and then test it to ensure it behaves as
expected. In particular:
- how does one switch to and from split pane?
- how does it integrate with the multi tab feature?
- does it do what multiple tabs do at least as well, in particular how
do I know where each pane is pointing, and where I am currently on the
UI?
- what specific problems does it want to solve? How do Xfce users
currently solve them (speculative or real data)? Is the split pane way
better?
- is it gonna be obvious to the users who would benefit from the split
panes why they would?
- is the inclusion of split panes harmful in any way to existing users
(that requires serious brainstorming, really it does)?
- who will maintain your patch? is the cost/benefit ratio of the above
questions worth them doing so?

You've done half of the job with a working example, I do encourage you
to do the other half!

Best regards,

2014-11-14 15:13 GMT+00:00 Román <rgmf at riseup.net>:
> On Thu, 13 Nov 2014 10:42:11 +0600
> Baurzhan Muftakhidinov <baurthefirst at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 12:09 AM, Román <rgmf at riseup.net> wrote:
>> > Hello,
>> >
>> > I have uploaded my thunar code with split pane view feature to my github and my gitorious:
>> >
>> > https://github.com/rgmf?tab=contributions&from=2014-09-02
>> > https://gitorious.org/xfce4-thunar/xfce4-thunar/source/5bf7c9cf2aa9ef18e64be09437e54a4fb704b1c0:
>> >
>> > In addition I have uploaded the patch to this Bug:
>> >
>> > https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10232
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> It's great that you uploaded the patch to Xfce's bugzilla.
>>
>> As for github, it has a great feature to import remote repositories, which
>> is suggested when you create a new repository. By your current repo,
>> it's hard to understand what's changed.
>>
>> Just my 2 cents,
>>
>> I will try this patch soon,
>>
>> Regadrs,
>
>
> Hello Baurzhan and thanks for your suggestion. I didn't know that github feature. I am going to do that in my github.
>
> Cheers.
>
>
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>
> --
> Román <rgmf at riseup.net>
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-- 
Steve Dodier-Lazaro
PhD Student in Information Security
University College London
Free Software Developer
OpenPGP : 1B6B1670