GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 82107
Turn off the sidebar and location bar by default
Last modified: 2006-12-26 18:29:38 UTC
IMHO, the default nautilus look is to cluttered and can be confusing to users. 1) The location bar should be off by default. First, the location bar is a feature that is used by fairly advance users. Since it requires knowledge of the layout of the unix filesystem to be of any use. To a user new to unix, being able to enter in a location doesn't mean anything if they aren't familiar with the unix directory system. Which leads to my second point, though more thorough user testing is needed, I suspect that for the vast majority of new users (particularly windows converts) the presence of the location bar strongly suggests that nautilus can be used as a web browser. Currently the consensus seems to be that nautilus will be primarily a file manager and that galeon will be the gnome web browser. Based on this consensus, I think it is important to visually distinguish nautilus to avoid the misconception that nautilus is a web browser. In very informal user testing (basically my old roomates and my girlfriend) most users i tested inferred from the ui that nautilus could be used as a web browser. If an advance user really want to use nautilus as a web browser or wants to use the bar for file system navigation than we should make them go the extra step to turn on the location bar 2) The sidebar should be off by default The sidebar takes up an enormous amount of screen space( about 1/5 of the nautilus window) while providing little to no user benefit. The main benefit of the sidebar is that it shows folder information with all the tabs turned off. However this information should really be displayed in the status bar see bug 42935. The default tabs, notes and history, are not commonly used enough to justify using up the such a large portion of screen space.
cc'ing usability-maint.
I concur with both points and would even go so far as to remove the location bar and sidebar completely.
I don't think we should remove the location bar, it can be very useful for advance users. The sidebar has limited use. Personally I find the tree and history sidebars quite useless...However many users have commented that they find the notes panel very handy, and I would hate to remove a feature that users enjoy. One option would be to remove the sidebar completeley and instead add a show notesbar to the view menu, maybe even move the notes bar to bottom of the page so that users have more horizontal space in which to type notes. Calum what do you think (also would you like to be added to usability-maint???)
Sidebar I would happily hide by default, although I wouldn't yet remove it altogether-- flawed as it is, I do tend to use the tree view on those rare occasions that I use nautilus for anything at all :) But if/when we have a proper tree view in the main Nautilus view, there are probably nicer ways to accomplish all the other things the sidebar is currently used for. Location bar I'd be happier to hide by default if the title bar showed the full path to the current directory, or if there was a menu item or toolbar button that let you pick/type a directory to open from a standard file dialog. I don't see either of those things in my build (May 29th) though, so I'd be a little more worried about that one... typing into the location bar is still the main way I jump around folders in Nautilus, so I'd be surprised if I was the only one. Oh and yes, I would like to be on usability-maint :)
Ah, I see bug #82112 addresses my "Open Location" comment (but not the path-in-titlebar thing).
calum i filed a bug to put the full path in the title bar, but seth rejected it and closed it. So i filed a bug with metacity to provide window path popups like in macos 9....sigh.... I think the issue of spacial reference is sort of obtuse to this issue though. I also think one solutino would be to provide a pulldown menu on the up arrow....see bug 83105 But baring this issue, do you generally agree with me. ps. you can use ctrl+L or go location to open the location bar when not using it in the window.
Also i don't advocate removing the location bar or sidebar either but i really think the cloud the interface. plus as stated before, thelocation bar just isn't as handy in a file manager/shell like nautilus, since users use the app differently than a web browser. In a web browser you are entering a specific location you want to go to (eg. www.gnome.org) in a file manager/ shell you are usually traversing the file hierarchy with the toolbar buttons, plus less advance users really don't have an understanding of the unix filesystem, nor should they really have to.
These are some comments from seth in support: The navigation metaphor as it exists today is horribly busted. People see it on the web, but that doesn't necessarily mean they don't know how to use it, and even if they do, doesn't mean its comfortable/convenient for them to work with. It is a travesty that URLs ended up being a necessary evil on the web, but it is understandable given the technical/social/political constraints the web became popular under (as well as, of course, its development-by-scientists-and-engineers roots). The web is an unconstrained system with an effectively infinite number of nodes arranged in an ad-hoc cyclic graph. There is no formal mechanism for determining the structure of this graph, and it changes every day. This is desirable for a variety of social/political reasons, but does not present a particularly desirable interface. People can and DO pay for somebody to provide a coherent non-adhoc system ala AOL (which, interestingly enough while you're inside the AOL structure, is free from, oh, say, a location bar). Try looking at a simple *path* without familiarity blinders on. Paths are pretty archane! WTH does "/" or "\" mean? Now look at a URI. Worse, much worse. Now we have a bizarre little "protocol handler" at the front. Plus making people learn paths/URIs is totally unnecessary. MacOS just provides a nice proof-of-concept that this is true....I bet most MacOS users (or even most of you) don't know what the path seperator character is in MacOS. WRT to the inevitable argument that paths/URIs are powerful and convenient once you learn them...so are terminals. Are you in favour of trying to coax our user base into learning the Unix command shell? I would speculate that the most people use the location bar for on the web is to either transcribe whole URIs they find in e-mail, in a magazine, etc into the location bar, or type in "foo.com" (or just "foo" for some people/browsers). None of these represent nor require an understanding of how URI paths, etc function. How many people do you think actually know to erase a level of path levels to try and find the "parent page"? URIs are, for most people, long-unique-string-identifiers, not expressions of structure (other than the ".com" part which people do understand indicates which web site they are on). The filesystem, thank goodness, is NOT such a system as the web. It is constrained in structure, size and other important attributes that do not necessitate as miserable a structure as URIs for navigation. On the filessytem, its actually reasonable to browse without ever typing anything into a bar. There's actually a root to the filesystem, for example. The "web metaphor" isn't a good thing, its a *bad* thing necessitated by a lack of useful constraints in the design of the web. We shouldn't replicate it for the filessytem when we can do so much better. The presence of the location bar fragments the ability to provide a coherent working-metaphor of the filesystem as a group of objects. It foists the fairly confusing navigation metaphor onto users in just about the worst possible representation possible (an archane string). Since its fairly trivial to press CTRL-L for those that actually need/want that ability (and to be honest, I only type very occasionally into the Nautilus location bar compared to the number of clicks I use), I'm strongly in favour of not displaying the location bar by default.
Created attachment 10845 [details] patch
setting 2.2 milestone if this is to go in it has to be by then. adding PATCH keyword
Bug 104670 needs to be addressed before this can be applied
uhh sort of disagree with that ascertion. Unfortunately what you're asking for in that bug would require some major rethought as to the organization of the nautilus menus. This patch should really be applied regardless imho. The sidebar actions are really minor niceties.
Sorry. I misused the word "addressed". I know that it will not be fixed before this one. I just want it to be kept in mind I guess.
Are we planning on moving the zoom and "view as" items to the main toolbar before/shortly after this gets applied? Should this be dependent on bug 80363? Users will not be able to find these controls otherwise.
This is fixed in the spatial nautilus branch.
Mass reassigning bugs with 2.2.0 milestone to 2.2.x milestone Grep for "Mass reassigning" to filter out this bug spam.