GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 310413
Pathbar calls homedir 'Desktop' when desktop == home
Last modified: 2011-03-26 13:56:24 UTC
Distribution/Version: mandriva cooker If /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir is set to true, then the path bar shows 'Desktop' (this is an untranslatable string, even) instead of the name of the home directory. Expected behaviour is to show the name of the home dir instead.
Fix contained in patch attached to [1]. It changes the pathbar label to "Home", which is consistent with the file chooser. I'm not sure whether we should change that in other locations as well. I'll attach a screenshot to illustrate the issue. Usability crew? [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2005-July/msg00196.html
Created attachment 49190 [details] Current situation Note "chris" in the sidepane and in the title and "Home" in the pathbar. Also note that the button left of "Home" says "home". I've heard that in GTK+ 2.7 the situation is similar wrt the pathbar, i.e. it reads "Home" and is below /home.
*** Bug 313467 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 314031 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bug 14031 has a similar screenshot (attachment 51026 [details]).
From a usability perspective, I think we are thinking in the wrong way. Gnome is trying to map home directories to the file system. This is bound to create trouble. The problem is that we try to map concepts of unix onto concepts of everyday life, instead of mapping concepts of everyday life onto unix. E.g. When an office user asks a collegue for the sales report of this month, he will refer to the person who has it, not to the place where that person keeps it.He will say something like: "Joan, please give me the sales report" not "Top drawer in the desk of the first office on the first floor, please give me the sales report." To get it right, users home directories should probably be something associated with the full name of the user in the password entries, rather than the place in the file system. We need something like a "users:/" location to show the home directories of all users by real names, whith the login id appended withing parenthesis in case of ambiguity i.e differentiate between "Joan Smith (jmith)", "John Smith (jhnsmith)". When nautilus displays the users:/ location there should be no up arrow availabe, just like there is no up arrow available in trash:/. Preferrably only users who have been kind enough to set their permissoins to their home folder so we can read it should be shown in the users:/ location. The file browser should remain a file browser, and always show the actual file system name, regardless if it is /home/jsmith or /home/jsmith/Desktop, and the pathbar should use these file system names as well. In a desktop environment users think of the file system like their file cabinet (enforced by the nautilus file cabinet icon). Artefacts that are conceptually different from things you normally access by going to your file cabinet should have their own locations (e.g trash:/ amd my proposed users:/). If you go to a location such as my proposed user:/ or to the trash:/ and browse downwards an up arrow operation should never make you enter anything above that location. As an example if you put a folder F in your trash and go to the location trash:/. Then you see the folder F. If you double click F to enter it your pathbar currently looks like: [<][Home][.Trash][F] In my oppinion this is wrong as it breaks the isolation between the file cabinet and the trash can concept. Instead they should look like [Trash][F] My proposed users:/ location should work in a similar way. Shortcuts could be added to the places menu for "users:/" and "users:/current user". displayed as Home both in the path bar and in folder listing of the users:/ folder.
adding usability keyword
I think this bug should be Priority: Normal and Severity: Trivial since there's no loss of functionality and there are much more important bugs to solve first.
*** Bug 316191 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bug 316191 also points out that Nautilus treats the home dir different in the sidebar, as shown by attachment 52166 [details].
Lowering priority & severity.
This seems to work for me now. Anyone else? By the way, the screenshot from comment #10 was of the GTKFilechooser, not Nautilus.
I don't see this problem in 2.28.
Changing component as part of ongoing bug reorganisation work.
This was reportedly fixed circa 2007, confirmed fixed in 2010, and I definitely can't see this bug in 3.0. Note that this is about the pathbar, not the sidebar.