FileManagerImprovement

FileManagerImprovement

Status

Introduction

We are going to fix some of the major problems our users have with file management using nautilus in Ubuntu.

Implementation Plan

There has been a lot of discussion about the Ubuntu changes to nautilus spatial interaction, and some frustration that there is no visible option in the user interface. We will add a new checkbox to the behavior section of the behavior tab in the File Management preferences dialogue. There are a number of corner cases in the current implementation of this patch, we will endeavor to find and fix all of them. Additionally, we will submit this patch upstream and see if it will be accepted.

The nautilus bookmarks menu is not synchronized with the GTK+ file chooser bookmarks or panel Places menu - this is a bug, and will be fixed.

We have discussed the idea of using an existing mtools gnome-vfs backend for stateless access to vfat formatted floppy disks, which fixes a major usability issue with floppies and mounting in Linux. This mtools backend also provides mtools network access to thin client floppy drives, which is an attractive feature for our ThinClientIntegration project (as discussed with JimMcQuillan and EricHarrison). We will try this out early on in the BreezyBadger devel process, and see how it goes. It may not be appropriate for inclusion in the final release.

It would be rad if we could integrate baz into the existing nautilus-vcs module, or include something like barter. Either of these would provide a GUI file manager interface to baz revision control.

For BreezyBadger, we will decide on a number of folders included in /etc/skel, so users have a lovely set of work areas in their home folder by default. These will be shipped in a separate package which ubuntu-desktop depends on. The most important folders we will do immediately are "Desktop", "Documents" and "Templates". A number of other folders have been suggested, including "Music", "Videos" and the difficult choice between "Pictures", "Photos" and "Graphics".

We will attempt to adorn these folders with emblems by default, but there are some technical concerns with how we implement this: The metadata filenames are encoded as full folder URIs, which means if the home folder is not at "/home/username" by default, these emblems won't work. Another way of solving this would be to add more specific folder hacks to nautilus, such as the current "Desktop" emblem. We could also seed this metadata at nautilus first startup. By including more English folder names by default, we raise the difficult discussion regarding translation of file and folder names, which has come up within GNOME before.

Packages Affected

  • nautilus

  • gnome-vfs

  • ubuntu-skel-defaults (or similar new package)

CategoryUdu CategorySpec

UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/FileManagerImprovement (last edited 2008-08-06 16:31:00 by localhost)