GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 700321
Location auto-complete is way too enthusiastic, and confusing
Last modified: 2016-03-10 22:09:05 UTC
I'm running F19, fully updated, GTK+ 3.8.1-1.fc19. Lately, in the GTK+ file chooser, I've noticed that there seems to be some kind of auto-complete thing for the Location: field which is way too enthusiastic, and doesn't even _work_. The attached video should illustrate the problem. I really don't want an auto-complete menu for the Location: field to pop up the instant I switch into a different directory; I can see all the choices right there, and just as I'm moving my mouse to one, the menu pops up and completely sandbags my navigation. If it's going to pop up, it could at least work in a non-confusing way. How it works makes technical sense, but little user sense. It is an auto-complete field: whatever you pick from it shows up the Location: field. But it doesn't change the selection in the 'main' pane, which is kind of confusing. It's especially weird behaviour with directories - in the situation shown in the video, if I click one of the sub-directories of 'isos', the name of that subdirectory shows up in the Location: bar, but the dialog doesn't actually navigate into that directory, nor is it selected in the 'main' pane. It's just not very useful behaviour.
Created attachment 244212 [details] screencast illustrating the problem
I think I can reproduce this if I navigate to a semi-deep directory (/home/federico/Downloads/foo/bar/baz), open the location entry, and click around in the pathbar. The completions popup appears sometimes when changing directories. It should not do that. I'll investigate.
This is fixed now in gtk-2-24, all the way up to master.