"People often save files to the wrong place.

When people create a new document, they reach a point at which they need to save it for the first time — they have been taught that the computer will lose their work unless they save it."

I agree this is a real problem, but I don't believe giving users even more options to choose among, or forcing them trough a process where you must select a folder can solve it, because what you ultimately care about is your document, not where it lives, as long as you can easily find it back, interact with it, and its storage is reliable. There are other ideas (e.g. [1]) being designed/developed that try to tackle this problem from another point of view, which don't include the concept of "file manager" at all, and I personally think that's a more future-proof way forward.

That being said, I'm not a designer, so I'll comment to your proposed "rules":

" * If you do a file operation, you add that file's folder to recently-used."

Why is that so? Which is the correlation that makes me want to see e.g. sftp://user@mywebsitehosting.org:public_html/img/ when I later try to save a spreadsheet or a mail attachment?

" * If you launch a file, we already add that file via nautilus-recent, and the
file chooser will be able to extract the corresponding folder from the logged
URI."

Again, I'm missing the correlation between launching a file somewhere and having to save something later in the same place. Is it a common pattern? I imagine this maybe being useful if the application you launched and the application you're saving a file from are the same (say, I open a picture with GIMP and later I want to save a modified version of it) but in that case I believe the application itself should default to the path of the current file.

" * If you "keep a Nautilus window open", we should log the folder.  But we
shouldn't log intermediate folders along a navigation sequence - if you open
Home, then Documents, then SubDocument, then FinalFolder and leave *that* one
open when you switch to another app, you only want to log FinalFolder but not
the other ones.  So, should we log on a FocusOut event, or a timeout, or
something like that?"

This sounds like it could potentially add a lot of noise to the recently used database, and I don't see how it could help with choosing a name/folder for the first save operation on a file.

Generally, I believe something like GtkRecentManager fits much better with files rather than folders.

[1] https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Documents

(In reply to comment #1)

> I agree this is a real problem, but I don't believe giving users even more
> options to choose among, or forcing them trough a process where you must select
> a folder can solve it, because what you ultimately care about is your document,
> not where it lives, as long as you can easily find it back,

Indeed you care about your document, and you care about finding it back, but you also care about keeping it in a good place indefinitely.  Things like a recent-manager (call it the journal, or the Documents app, or whatever) are good for maintaining your working set of files, but they are not good for medium- or long-term storage.

Part of my thesis is that the hierarchical file system is a good way of organizing data *if* you can get your data organized since the beginning.  the idea behind getting files saved to the right place is that you will not need to clean them up later.

(In the long-term future I hope that we can extend Nautilus to be like the proposed http://www.organise-fw.org/ - a semantic file manager - but that still requires an underlying storage.  The traditional, hierarchical file system is a good storage even for that; there is no reason to discard it.)

> That being said, I'm not a designer, so I'll comment to your proposed "rules":

You don't need to apologize for not being a designer.  You are a very smart and competent hacker - and, Cosimo, that is not a gratuitous compliment - and you can certainly evaluate whether a design is sound, whether it comes from a self-appointed body of "designers" or not.

> " * If you do a file operation, you add that file's folder to recently-used."
> 
> Why is that so? Which is the correlation that makes me want to see e.g.
> sftp://user@mywebsitehosting.org:public_html/img/ when I later try to save a
> spreadsheet or a mail attachment?

As soon as you use it, that folder becomes part of your working set.  This is the same kind of "working set" as what would be for a filesystem cache - it is the set of stuff that you are most likely to need again soon.  We want to present the user with the most likely folders that he may need, and we extract that information from the recently-used list.

Think of using a file in a folder as making that folder "hot".  You may need to copy another file from that folder into another place (or you may need to visit the destination folder, since you had a good reason for copying the file there).

> Again, I'm missing the correlation between launching a file somewhere and
> having to save something later in the same place. Is it a common pattern?

Yes, this is a common pattern.  You create a picture for your presentation and save it in ~/Documents/MyPresentation - then you go back to your presentation program and insert the picture in a slide.  You then go back to that folder and open your word-processing document which contains the conference paper relative to that presentation; maybe you also have a text file in that folder with notes about what you want to include in your paper.  It's just grouped files.

> Generally, I believe something like GtkRecentManager fits much better with
> files rather than folders.

I'm implementing the recent-folders approach for the file chooser right now, so we'll have a chance to see how it works out.  If it feels comfortable, would you agree to logging folders this way in Nautilus, too?  (I can take care of the code.)

Bug 663213 is related / might be a potential dup.

Agree with Cosimo. I don't think adding folders to recent files makes any sense. If you need a list of folders just take them from the paths of the files already in recent files.

I don't think showing folders in the recent file list of the file chooser is a good idea either. In file selection mode you want a file (or files). If that file was recently used it should be visible to you already. In folder selection mode you want to pick a folder, so it may be useful to suggest the folders that contain some of the recently used files. As mentioned above, I think the obvious way to get these is from the recently used file paths themselves. File save mode is a combination of the two. You can select a previously used file or folder.

I don't see any case that isn't already covered. Is there one?

Frederico, can you answer comment #4? TIA!

Ah, this bug got stale - thanks for the reminder.

The only missing case is when people leave a couple Nautilus windows open during the day so that they can work out of them, and they would also like to have those folders available from the file chooser.

However, the file chooser already picks up folders from the list of recently used files.  It won't pick up absolutely everything you do in Nautilus (like moving a file or just visiting a folder), but it's adequate for now.

I'll close the bug.  We need some real testing to see what people expect.