GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 340345
Idea for better layout of "Computer" in Nautilus
Last modified: 2010-05-27 22:28:14 UTC
The 'Computer' location in Nautilus might be more useful if the layout was different, something like what's shown in the attached picture (I didn't do any coding, just took a screenshot and moved things around in GIMP). The 'Places' category would have system entries like the network, root filesystem, and home directory (maybe other things like fonts:/// belong there too?). The 'Drives' category would have the physical drives (mounted CDs/DVDs and USB drives as well as hard drives), and of course selecting one would go to its mount point - this would make managing hard drives much easier. Also, I really hate to copy from Microsoft, but I saw this nice feature in a Windows Vista beta on a friend's computer where there would be a progress bar next to the drive icon at the top level showing how much space was left. If the progress bar is too hard to implement or no one likes the idea, it could be put in the information side panel instead for when the drive is selected. In my opinion, opening 'Computer' from the desktop to see the different physical drives is a lot more convenient and intuitive than finding an entry on the System->Administration menu. Also, the properties dialogs for the items at the 'Computer' level should show the properties of the drive, not the config files representing them. It could show the mount point, filesystem type, and free space/capacity, and have actions in the properties dialog and context menu for formatting or checking the drive.
Created attachment 64636 [details] Idea for layout of Computer in Nautilus
This is interesting. I am a bit confused about the overlap of Places and Drives with the Filesystem icon. It seems to take on the properties of both. The capacity item viewed as additional info is cool. I like it a lot better than just saying 10gb are free/used. What this is hinting at is a much improved way to show items in an arrangement mode. The arrange by modes have always suffered a bit from a clear delineation between types. A similar type of visual scheme could be applied to file types, sort letter, etc.
>I am a bit confused about the overlap of Places and >Drives with the Filesystem icon. It seems to take on the properties of both. I guess my idea with that was that the Filesystem icon would lead to the root of the filesystem no matter what drive it was on, where the different drive icons would lead only to their mount points (of course, one would be the root dir). The properties for the Filesystem icon would also show the total free space in the filesystem, instead of that particular drive. That way it would reflect how the filesystem is abstracted from the actual drives, maybe not too useful on a normal desktop but it could help on a system which has multiple hard drives or mounts major sections of the filesystem over the network. Maybe that's not the best way, though - if you think that could be confusing, the Filesystem icon could be removed and one of the drives could be marked with an emblem to show that's where the root directory is mounted, or something similar. Showing the mount point underneath the icon could also be useful, although that would just take up even more space... Thanks for looking at my idea.
I like your idea, with this, "Computer" section is much more organized :-)
Thanks for the bug report. It's great to get interesting design ideas. I'm going to close this, since the bug is old, and it looks like Nautilus is going in a different direction to this. Feel free to post back if you would like to continue developing your design idea though.