GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 94635
Only one item should be highlighted at a time.
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Currently it is possible to highlight more than one item in Nautilus. This is confusing and ambiguous. For example: 1) Start Nautilus and type "/tmp" in the location bar and press Enter. Nautilus shows a list of the files in /tmp. 2) Rubber band select some files and/or directories. They change colors to show that they are highlighted. 3) Use the mouse to select the text in the location bar. Now two things are highlighted. It's not clear to the user which item has the focus. If the user presses the Delete key, what gets deleted? The files or the text in the location bar? It just so happens that the text in the location bar gets deleted because it was the last widget touched, but this isn't visually evident. Switching steps 2 and 3 will cause the file to get deleted instead of the text. I propose that only area of the window be selectable at any point in time. If the user selects the text in the notes or location bar, then the selection in the file viewer should be unselected.
In list view, the highlighted bit changes color to indicate whether the selected files or the text has focus. I assume your bug report refers to icon view?
The highlighted bit changes color in the list view, but it changes from one shade of blue to another. You still have two items that appear selected, only now they are two different shades of blue. It's still not clear what will get deleted if you press the Delete key. I think the right thing to do is to make all highlighted selections return to their un-highlighted state when a new selection is made.
The standard way to handle this in GTK is to have two colors, SELECTED and ACTIVE. SELECTED is the currently selected, focused color, ACTIVE is used for selections that aren't focused. (fwiw, the icon view now correctly uses ACTIVE)