GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 41787
"New Document" hierarchical menu
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Arlo suggests a New Document hierarchical menu that would appear in the File menu and the background context menu for directory views. The menu would contain a list of applications that support this feature, a la Windows. E.g.: New Document -> AbiWord Gimp Gnumeric Choosing an application name would either launch that application with a new empty document or perhaps just create an icon in the viewed directory for a new empty document of that type, not sure which. This seems to me like a large feature that we should not consider for our first release. ------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2000-07-27 09:13:53 ---- GMC has something similar (although I think it just launches the applications, and doesn't create a new document) and it's often discussed on the GNOME mailing lists. It's based on ".desktop" files, I believe. I am marking this deferred, but of course I do not have the last word. ------- Additional Comments From eli@eazel.com 2000-10-16 19:33:55 ---- Batch-assigning QA ownership of remaining bugs to eli@eazel.com ------- Additional Comments From eli@eazel.com 2001-02-21 11:16:29 ---- QA Assigning to brett. Sorry for the spam. ------- Additional Comments From eli@eazel.com 2001-03-26 11:13:21 ---- QA Assigning to self. ------- Additional Comments From jdub@aphid.net 2001-08-05 21:16:13 ---- An ideal solution for this would be to have ~/Nautilus/templates (or similar), much like we have a scripts folder. Whichever files you have in there appear on the menu, and are copied to the current directory and thrown into "rename" mode when chosen. ------- Bug moved to this database by unknown@bugzilla.gnome.org 2001-09-09 20:33 -------
I think I like the templates idea, esp. since its very easily user extensible and could provide a lot of flexibility (for example, Tuomas could easily create a 48x48 transparent XCF file template for "New Icon"). The one catch here is that I don't see a mechanism for users to easily name the template nicely for the "Create New" menu AND have Nautilus preserve file extensions. An alternative mechanism would be for Nautilus to "make up" the menu entry using the MIME type of the template and its description in the MIME database. But this would be broken if people wanted multiple templates with the same filetype. Also some document types won't be well suited out of the box to this, like images where current systems want to know the resolution before they create the image.
*** Bug 86158 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 45682 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 88408 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
an idea that I have been experimenting with is a template:// folder. users could open these templates and use them to create new documents. also doc apps would have to give the option of saving new user created templates derived from the stock templates.
*** Bug 102357 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 101317 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 102001 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Template directory is nice, but... if I understand Dave Bordoley's last comment correctly, having to go to the templates directory to create a new file from the template would be a pain - far easier to use the current directory context. One really cool alternative to a right-click operation would be a 'New Documents' sidebar which shows everything in template://. Click on one, and it creates a copy in your current directory in rename mode. More discoverable and less fiddly, especially when your list of templates gets big and/or heirarchical.
I assume that dave ment for templates:// to be used for maintaining, adding, deleting templates and not as a replacement for having it as a right click menu item. This would rock IMHO and would let the templates be merged from diferent locations (eg. /usr/share/templates and ~/.gnome2/templates).
Bug 77292 is related to this.
*** Bug 111742 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I'd love to see this in G2.6, and am willing to hack a little on it. Post G2.4 I'll bring this to d-d-l is no one else does first.
What would stop the list of apps from getting insanely long?
Maybe use a menu-editor of some kind? I wonder if the panel menu editor or toolbar-editor might make some sense? The default list could be short. The list could either contain an "edit me" entry, or maybe some other control-center applet would be appropriate. (Personally, I gravitate toward menu-editor, and less control-center). Another slightly more whacky idea: One of Windows XP's more "interesting" ideas is that the "Start" menu will, over time, begin hiding infrequently used applications, shrinking the size of the menu, but giving a control to expand it to its full-sized glory when you want to look for what's missing. I'm not sure what the heuristic is, or if a good one is possible - it usually seems to annoy me more than help. Anyway, maybe something like that would work better on a "new document" menu. By default you end up with a short list with the ability to get to more types as needed. I don't know that I like the idea of the context menu changing on me (it'd probably need to be pref'd for a11y as well). Not sure if I like this idea or not, but I thought I'd mention it.
> One of Windows XP's more "interesting" ideas is that the "Start" menu > will, over time, begin hiding infrequently used applications Are you sure about that? I've been using XP for nearly 2 years now and it's never hidden anything on my Start menu, even though I never use most of the stuff on there. (Oh, the list of apps on the left-hand side of the Start menu changes as you use things though, is that the part you're talking about? I thought you were talking about the "All Programs" part...)
This seems to be mainly fixed in nautilus-2.5 with the new ~/Templates folder, although through significantly simpler means than the [ .desktop files declaring templates ] scheme talked about in this bug. Marking as FIXED.