GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 326499
The file thing is absolutely unusable.
Last modified: 2006-01-10 21:07:24 UTC
This is probably a dupe, as I'm sure there are a zillion reports of this bug since the Web is also full of complaints and almost everyone I've talked to who isn't a Gnome zealot hates the feature. Or maybe there aren't dupes, since this thing requires registration, which is also why it took ages for me to bother to enter this report (and why I haven't reported a zillion other problems). Guess you don't want it reported how crappy Gnome software is? Anyway, I can't be bothered to find out since I'm really pissed with every single application that once was tolerable (yes, only tolerable, since WIMP is inherently unusable for most uses) becoming absolutely unusable in one respect. I'm talking of the sneaking of the abomination known as Gnome file chooser into gtk. What's wrong with it? Keyboard support *stinks*. It's designed for mice, not men. To make any use of the keyboard, you have to open yet-another-dialog, as if there weren't already enough of them in the stinking WIMP paradigm. And even in this dialog completion sucks: you have to move your hand to the cursor key block to use it. Same with type-ahead find: it doesn't support "..", and the only way to go up is Alt+Up, which is very far from the typing position. And, of course in the usual Gnome one-size-fits-all F.I. fashion, none of these keys are configurable in a well-documented manner, if at all. And the save dialog has two parts. That's absolutely stupid as well. Please add an alternative file dialog. Add back the old one. It was tolerable (although not perfect). Bring the mono-culture to an end. Other information:
Kindly take it somewhere else.
> Kindly take it somewhere else. Such as? This isn't the place to report Gnome bugs? No wonder it was locked behind registration. Seriously, what's so difficult about adding support for the old dialog? Why's nobody who can do something about this in a reasonable time frame (a few hours to a day) not listening to their users? "It's free software - you can change it" does not really apply to bloatware. Not that Gnome in general has a good track record of fixing bugs as evidenced e.g. by <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109246> that took years to fix -- and only after which I managed to switch from Opera to Firefox. But now it's back to Opera again thanks to Gnome file chooser. Perhaps eventually I'll have to switch to Windows entirely thanks to the spreading of the mono-culture of Gnome.
I'm not going to dig out all the dupes for the issues you mentioned... adding more dupes is not going to help that cause.
And I guess you don't even care to explain why the issue is not going to be fixed? So typical of Gnome. "Fuck the users. We know better."
There are known problems with the current filechooser filed in other bugs. These haven't been fixed YET.
After some *serious* digging through the piles of totally unrelated bugs I managed to find this and the proposal at the end of it: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136541. It's better than the current situation, but by no means good. It does not address the issue of cursor keys being used to scan through completions (^N/^P should work _everywhere_ where cursor keys do, but here Tab would be better), and it does not address the issue of the two-part save dialog. Also, where will the path be displayed when the text entry box is enabled?
Mr. or Ms. Registration Required: try rephrasing in a constructive and positive tone. Doesn't *always* work, but has a greater (as in, greater than almost zero) chance of getting a constructive answer.
There isn't much positive to be said about Gnome... infact I can't think of a thing, because it doesn't stay out of my way either, unlike KDE. That other bug is also _years_ old, and only now are some _plans_ being made, just like with that focus bug. Talk about chances of bug reports working.. My conjecture is that Gnome will only fix anything after they're flooded with complaints to the extent that their servers can't handle it.
If you mean that we could use more developers, then you are correct.
How about concentrating on fixing bugs instead of writing new ones?
This is going nowhere. Stop trolling.