Spatial Nautilus

[Maynard Kuona]

On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 07:35, Steve Bergman wrote:
> I've been using rawhide since a little before FC2-test1.  And I must say 
> that I am more than a bit taken aback by the new nautilus default mode.
> 
> I'm a KDE fan from before their 1.0 release, and it took a long while 
> for Gnome to win me over.  But it did eventually, and what won me over 
> was its adherence to the HIG, and the beautiful simplicity of Bluecurve 
> Gnome.  i.e. I'm not one of those people who bemoaned the replacement of 
> sawfish with metacity, and I like the "less is more" philosophy of the 
> current Gnome series.  Gnome has done a lot of things right.
> 
> So I can't help but feel that I am missing the boat when it comes to 
> spatial mode nautilus.  On the plus side, I can see that it certainly 
> has a cleaner look.  And that's it.
> 
> On the minus side, it wants to open a window for every mouse click, 
> navigation is cumbersome, finding what options you do have is a hunt and 
> peck afair.  I realize that if you know to "right click-> browse folder" 
> or "nautilus -browser", you can get the old behavior back, but what I 
> don't understand is why spatial is the default.  How does spatial mode 
> as the default benefit the new user?  To me, this seems to be a case of 
> cutting out too much of the interface.
> 
> I realize that this may really be a question for another list, but as 
> the Fedora project could decide to change the default, it seems an 
> appropriate thing to ask in this forum.  I almost feel that I should be 
> posting this to bugzilla instead of here.
> 
> What are the advantages of spatial that I am not seeing?
> 
Nothing has been cut out. You can get the old behavior back by setting a
gconf key to always browse. That way you will have the old behavior.

Now, for the second part. There are advantages to spatial, if you are
willing to use that mode the way it is intended to be used. The most
important is that it remembers the states of all you windows, and
therefore enables you to set up browse states for each directory by
simply changing the views and dragging the edges to make it a certain
size, and put it in a certain position. so, directories viewed in
nautilus are treated as objects with properties which the user sets.

Now, after a while, when a user gets used to using his desktop, he will
remember the positions of all the directories he works with.

That is the short version of it.

Also, a little trick, if you have a middle mouse button (who doesn't
have one these days :)  ), double middle click opens a new window and
kills the parent window immediately. So you never have extra windows
open, or you can always kill parent windows once you get to the
directory you wanted to browse to.