Lets take the worst of windows and make it the unchangeable default of linux

[Owen Taylor]

On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 09:00, Aaron Bennett wrote:

> Here is the procedure for copying a file from /home/abennett/music to 
> /var/www/html/music using the spatial mode of the nautilus filemanager:
> 
> 1.  Click "home" -
> 2.  Click "music" - leaves the "home" window open
> 3.  Right click on "file"
> 4.  Close the "home" window
> 6.  Close the "music" window
> 7.  Click "computer"
> 8.  Click "filesystem" -- leaves the "computer" window open
> 9.  Click "var" -- leaves the "/" window open
> 10.  Click "www" -- leaves the "var" window open
> 11.  Click "html" -- leaves the "www" window open
> 12.  Right click in "html" and select "paste file"
> 13.  Close "www"
> 14.  close "html"
> 15.  close "var"
> 16.  close "/"
> 17.  close "computer"
> 
> My question is:
> 
> Does it seem, to you, in your opinion, that it ought to take 17 mouse 
> clicks to copy a file?  It's the leaving the old windows open as 
> artificacts that makes this so intolerable.
> 
> I'm not accusing you of trying to be like windows here.  Actually, 
> windows allows the user the ability to disable this behavior if they 
> wish, so being a little bit more "like windows" might not be a bad thing...
> 
> Or, am I missing something? 

Various notes on how an experienced user could accomplish this faster:

 - If you are frequently copying stuff to /var/www/html/music,
   you'd presumably create a link on your desktop to
   /var/www/html or /var/www/html/music.
 - Shift-click tunnels
 - Control-L brings up a dialog allowing you to enter a path

Now, of course, this doesn't really answer the question because 
the second two won't be found by the majority of users. But then
again, if the majority of users have to navigate to
/var/www/html/music starting from /, we've lost.

Not really having paid much attention to:

 http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list

(but please look there if you want to see more data), I think spatial
mode makes two assumptions:

 - Navigation can be kept shallow for non-expert users
 - Expert users will make frequent use of Control-L

Regards,
						Owen