GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 671051
Textfiles should be considered documents
Last modified: 2018-05-04 12:08:39 UTC
It seems that gnome-documents does not consider plain text files as documents. I often use them to write some Notes using gedit without opening a "full" office app like libreoffice-writer. They should just show up as documents. (Textfiles here means ones without an extension or *.txt but files like *.c are obviously not documents).
I fear the number of non-documents txt is quite high and we would pollute the documents pool. I think creating a notes app is a better solution to your particular problem... https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Notes
I agree this is not something we want in Documents.
*** Bug 683336 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 687565 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
After talking to Rishi on IRC, he asked me to add my use case… I use text files to store information such as stock lists, which can be 100s of lines long, as an intermediary between two other file formats, for text templates, for stuff that I want to share with users of other operating systems, for plain text notes that I want to be able to move between different machines. I also cannot think of any reason why plain text files may end up in ~/Documents or ~/Downloads unless the user intentionally put them there or downloaded them.
Not sure I agree. It's hard to really get this right with text files though because it's such a widely used format. However, I would also add, that you're unlikely to put text files in ~/Documents which aren't documents or of some relevance, normally, the sort of text files not in ~/Documents I wouldn't want indexed - e.g. configuration files. Perhaps that's just me though? One thing is true, of all the data I have in ~/Documents, I would want text files indexed and found by GNOME apps - I certainly wouldn't want to have to choose my app (i.e. GNOME Notes vs GNOME Documents) based on the file format. This is the sort of thing I would consider as user preference if it's so widely split. I personally would expect GNOME Documents to show my text files. So why not have an option to disable this and show by default? That way people can slimline their hits from Tracker based on what they want to see.
To be clear: I am not sure I agree with Cosimo and Jakub from comments #1 and comment #2.
My comments come years later, but... As a new user I was surprised to find out that txt-files under my Documents are not shown in Documents, even though they are indexed by Tracker. I don't consider my old notes in plain text anymore pollution than my huge collection of PDF-files.