GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 62524
Let user define more than one root/top-level nodes
Last modified: 2005-07-15 15:08:05 UTC
Currently the tree sidebar does only display the filesystem starting at its root. IMHO, it would be very helpful to have more than one root (top-level) node, not just "/". Example: the home directory of the user. Best thing would be if the user had complete control over all root nodes. So he could specify several root nodes with: name, location (within the filesystem), and optionally icon. Multiple root nodes do help quick navigation from one part of the filesystem to another. It has the advantage that you can define all areas of the filesystem that you are using regularly and you can quickly open/close these dirs (along w/ all subdirs!) in order to e.g. move or copy files from one dir to another. I would like to be able to specify at least the following root nodes for example: name: "root", location: "/" name: "home", location: "/home/gambler" (my home dir) name: "windows", location: "/windows" (windows partition) name: "system docs", location: "/usr/share/doc" name: "cd", location: "/cdrom", icon: "/path/to/some/cd/rom/icon.png" I could then open "home" and "cd" when I need to copy data to/from my CD-ROM drive (which I do quite regularly), and when I want to have a quick look at some docs in /usr/share/doc I could temp. close "cd" (getting all those now unnecessary subdirs out of my way) and open "system docs" instead.
This would be a very helpful improvement. On my system, the tree view is useless because about 300 people's /home/$USER show up on it, making it impossible to find my own /home. This would make the tree view a useful thing. Wish I could vote for this bug!
There was a discussion on the nautilus ML, which brought up the idea of "places" in Nautilus (see http://lists.eazel.com/pipermail/nautilus-list/2002-January/007014.html and the following mails for the details). This brought up some quite good ideas, whereas I think we should not add yet another way of doing things (like adding some buttons in the toolbar, etc.), but this is just my opinion, of course. :) I think this should be combined with my above idea. In fact, one of the things that always annoyed me with the Windows Explorer was that all these detailled trees get in the way of quickly switching my different "places" (which I have mounted as different "network" drives). Instead of making that same mistake (and just copying the UI) we should add "place" tabs at the top of the tree sidebar. Thus, we order the important places horizontally and keep them at the top of the trees, everytime. Each place tab could just consist of (e.g.) a large icon. The name or location of this place is not shown, in order to reduce the required space, but is shown as root of this tree. When we give the user the option to define the icons (along with the size) or to even number these instead (using digits, letters, ...), we could not only make "places" (as stated in the original mail) happen, but also make the tree sidebar a very good and intuitive thing to use (just my 2 cents :).
*** Bug 65034 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bug 65034 basically suggested adding some of the special uris as other root nodes. My comments basically where that applications:// is the only one that makes sense, and may be favorites if we add a favorites folder to nautilus. Home would probably be nice too, just to make it easier on the user.
Dave: well, $HOME really makes sense too. Poke around OSX a bit- some nice choices in this regard there. You don't have to know about anything 'above' $HOME if you don't want to, which is quite nice.
Louie: I agree on home, see above :) Kde has this too in it's tree. Also if we made the list view more like the osx tree view, it would be real nice to have multiple root nodes in it too..
I'd like to ask you again what you think of _not_ just introducing more root nodes in the tree view (like KDE, Windows Explorer, etc.) but to make something better (IMHO), like "tabbed trees". Have a look at the following ASCII illustration of the sidebar: (Sidebar Area) (Content Area) +-----------------------+----------------- | R | H | C | F | | +---+ +---------------+ | daniels Home | +-----------------------+ | mybin | | docs | | +-nautilus | | +-... | | | The upper-case letters in above example should resemble icons for: R = the root directory, H = users home directory, C = CD drive, F = floppy drive, possibly more of course. "mybin", etc. are the directories in my $HOME, with a tree example showing the directory $HOME/docs/nautilus. The idea is to be able to quickly switch between the different "places" tabs by simply clicking on the icons. Advantages are that only the relevant tree (of the current "place") is being shown, the tree state of the different tabs could be remembered (i.e. one does not need to collapse trees in order to get a better overview or so, see below ;), one always sees with a quick glance what is currently being shown, and one can very quickly change to another "place". If we simply put more "root nodes" in the current tree and some trees are opened, it is hard sometimes to find your "places" between all the different open directory trees. That's how the Windows explorer works currently (using W2k as example): the concept of "My Computer", "My Documents", and "My Network Places" has been introduced. But after some time I find it really hard to locate these "root nodes" between all the expanded trees. I end up closing as many trees as possible just to see where I am. Of course I will need these directories eventually, so I will then open them again later. Just my 2 cents. ;) We could either keep this bug focussed on just introducing more "root nodes" besides /, or we could try to aim for something more ambitious with the "tabbed tree". If we keep this bug focussed on adding "root nodes", I'll consider open a new bug for "tabbed trees" since I think this would be a great advantage over the current simple tree idea with many root nodes. bye, daniel :)
Daniel, that is an awesome idea. I'll vote for this. I'm using WinXP (also), and I think explorer is currently far ahead anything linux can throw at it, at least when trying to cope with trees =)
This would be *really* nice. Adding myself to cc and removing GNOMEVER2.0 keyword (GNOMEVER2.3 supersedes it).
I've tried to implement something similar to the idea of Daniel Bachran. It works quite nice - at least for the first trial. My patch is made against nautilus 2.3.3. As my patch of Bug 82884 is also needed, I have integrated those changes. I've removed loading and saving of expansion states as IMO it isn't practical together with these changes.
Created attachment 17314 [details] [review] Patch to nautilus 2.3.3 implementing tabbed roots in the tree view
Any chance of a screenshot too?
Created attachment 17316 [details] Screenshot running patched nautilus 2.3.3
Setting version to 2.3.x, adding PATCH keyword and marking priority as high.
Can users mount floppy, cdrom and other drives easier when this patch is applied? Now accessing to floppy, cdrom and other mountable drives aren't easy, because users can mount drives in only one, not user-friendly way - right click on desktop and select disks from context menu. This way isn't intuitive and also isn't comfortable when you are working with file manager, because you should go to desktop, press right mouse button, select wanted disk driver from menu, then press with mouse on this drive, then go back to file manager, then copy files from file manager to disk drive, then close disk drive window (because you can't unmount while disk drive window is open) and then unmount drive. I think there should be tab "Mountable drives" or maybe separate tabs for each mountable drive (this is easy to implement, because nautilus already creates list of mountable drives when you press right click on desktop and choose Disks). Btw, there are any chance to include this patch in GNOME 2.4 ?
how about putting the tabs above the tree, because the tree needs all the horizontal space it can get.. The downside is that if you have a lot of tabs they won't fit if the sidebar is narrow.. but maybe the ultimate solution would be to make it configurable =) anyway, nice screenshot! added myself to cc
FYI, there is another screenshot floating around which shows another implementation (probably) done by Jörg I found at FootNotes [1]. Following FN postings show a positive feedback, at least up to now. Attaching it. regs, Chris [1] http://gnomedesktop.org/comments.php?op=showreply&tid=12611&sid=1164&pid=12587&mode=thread&order=1&thold=-1#12611
Created attachment 17516 [details] Another implementation. Roots stacked vertically.
Created attachment 17517 [details] Another implementation. Roots stacked vertically. 2nd attempt
Cool, another implementation with vertically stacked roots looks better. It's like sidebar in Mozilla - comfortable and easy to understand. I vote for implementation with vertically stacked roots :)
Mantas: Bugzilla is no place for advocating a solution without giving reasons (aka "Me too"). I just write this to prevent other users from writing null comments. Adding myself to CC. regs, Chris
cvs has multiroots.
Closing as it was reopened by accident.