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Bug 82107 - Turn off the sidebar and location bar by default
Turn off the sidebar and location bar by default
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: nautilus
Classification: Core
Component: [obsolete] Visual Design
0.x
Other other
: Normal enhancement
: 2.2.x
Assigned To: Nautilus Maintainers
Nautilus Maintainers
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2002-05-17 19:49 UTC by Dave Bordoley [Not Reading Bug Mail]
Modified: 2006-12-26 18:29 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: Unversioned Enhancement


Attachments
patch (2.69 KB, text/plain)
2002-09-02 05:33 UTC, Dave Bordoley [Not Reading Bug Mail]
Details

Description Dave Bordoley [Not Reading Bug Mail] 2002-05-17 19:49:40 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.
Comment 1 Luis Villa 2002-05-20 13:47:04 UTC
cc'ing usability-maint.
Comment 2 Gregory Merchan 2002-06-02 11:43:15 UTC
I concur with both points and would even go so far as to remove
the location bar and sidebar completely.
Comment 3 Dave Bordoley [Not Reading Bug Mail] 2002-06-04 19:59:10 UTC
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???)
Comment 4 Calum Benson 2002-06-05 18:38:00 UTC
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 :)
Comment 5 Calum Benson 2002-06-05 18:40:01 UTC
Ah, I see bug #82112 addresses my "Open Location" comment (but not the
path-in-titlebar thing).
Comment 6 Dave Bordoley [Not Reading Bug Mail] 2002-06-05 18:46:41 UTC
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.
Comment 7 Dave Bordoley [Not Reading Bug Mail] 2002-06-05 18:49:16 UTC
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.
Comment 8 Dave Bordoley [Not Reading Bug Mail] 2002-09-02 05:31:57 UTC
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.
Comment 9 Dave Bordoley [Not Reading Bug Mail] 2002-09-02 05:33:18 UTC
Created attachment 10845 [details]
patch
Comment 10 Dave Bordoley [Not Reading Bug Mail] 2002-09-02 05:34:27 UTC
setting 2.2 milestone if this is to go in it has to be by then. adding
PATCH keyword
Comment 11 Mark Finlay 2003-01-28 21:00:06 UTC
Bug 104670 needs to be addressed before this can be applied
Comment 12 Dave Bordoley [Not Reading Bug Mail] 2003-01-28 23:08:01 UTC
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.
Comment 13 Mark Finlay 2003-01-29 19:05:10 UTC
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.
Comment 14 Mark Finlay 2003-01-31 18:32:36 UTC
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.
Comment 15 Dave Bordoley [Not Reading Bug Mail] 2003-09-20 23:56:53 UTC
This is fixed in the spatial nautilus branch.
Comment 16 Christian Neumair 2006-12-26 18:29:38 UTC
Mass reassigning bugs with 2.2.0 milestone to 2.2.x milestone

Grep for "Mass reassigning" to filter out this bug spam.