GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 317640
TreeView type-ahead: Alternate between matches when match is not possible.
Last modified: 2006-04-19 14:50:55 UTC
That the user is able to navigate between the files/folders displayed in Nautilus by using the key on the keyboard that corresponds to the first letter of the file/folder name. Currently if there are two folders named "Fred" and "Ferdinand" and two files named "frop.txt" and "fiddling.mp3" being displyed in Nautilus then if the user presses the "f" key on the keyboard the focus will be moved to the folder named "Ferdinand" (i.e. the first objkect whose name starts with "f") Pressing the "f" key a second time does nothing. What should happen is that repeatedly pressing the "f" key should cycle the focus round each of the objects whose name starts with "f". In my example this would mean the focus shifts from "Ferdinand" to "Fred" to "fiddling.mp3" to "frop.txt" and then back to "Ferdinand" again. Other information: I am not a mouse user (when I must use the mouse I use a trackball). Wherever possible I use keyboard shortcuts. This missing functionality is my single biggest bugbear with Gnome and it infuriates me to the point that I cannot use it for day to day computing. Even Windows 3.1s File Manager had this keyboard navigation built in but in 2005 Gnome still doesn't support something so simple and useful. Boo ! Hiss !! Please correct this a.s.a.p. If Nautilus was written in C# I would even do this myself (sadly I code in VB.Net but could produce the necessary C# if pressed) For a project that states it's aim is usability this is a terrible, terrible omission. Thankyou.
Please note that my first paragraph was written in response to the question "What is the usability improvement you are suggesting ?" on your bug report form - hence it doesn't quite read well in the report (and I don;t seem to have the ability to edit my bug report) Ho hum...
We will provide a search popup (ctrl-f) for Nautilus 2.14, and probably additionally implement your suggestion.
Created attachment 52932 [details] C# code snippet to illustrate code required. This is a C# code snippet from a "non native" C# coder so may not best reflect the use of the language :)
We'll I do hope "and probably additionally implement your suggestion" means that you are actually going to do it. After all it's a trivial amount of code as I've hopefully illustrated with the C# code sample I've attached (I realise that Nautilus is probably not written in C# but I just wanted to illustrate how trivial a matter it is :) But if you're going to inplement a search popup then how about adding a filter text box to Nautilus ? The idea being that if there is text present in the filter only those items that contained the text would be visible. Alternatively (to make the point that a filter was in use) All items that matched the filter criteria would move to the top of the display (sorted in alphabetic order with all folders before files) and all items that didn't match would appear "greyed out". Just an idea.
Mass changing Nautilus version for bugs that have GNOME 2.13 version info.
Reassigning to GTK+ because that's where this type-ahead functionality is implemented. This seems to be what you are asking for: > if there are two folders named "Fred" and "Ferdinand" and two files > named "frop.txt" and "fiddling.mp3" [snip] then if the user presses the "f" > key on the keyboard the focus will be moved to the folder named > "Ferdinand" (i.e. the first objkect whose name starts with "f") Pressing the > "f" key a second time does nothing. > > What should happen is that repeatedly pressing the "f" key should cycle the > focus round each of the objects whose name starts with "f". At the moment, no action is taken if there is no match, but maybe it would be useful to just cycle through the previous matches.
Just to clear up what I am requesting. What I am asking for is that if a widget is displaying several items then if three of these items have names that start with either the letter "F" or the letter "f" then pressing the "f" key on the keyboard will cycle the focus round the items. This should be case insensitive and once the "end" of the series of matching items is reached the focus should shift back to the "start" of the series (so the focus should "loop" round each of the matching items) The only time no action should be taken is if the key being pressed does not match the first character of the name of any of the items on display. In this case the focus should be left on the currently selected item(s). But if this gets implemented in GTK+ all the better as that way the behaviour gets built into the widget set and all apps that use the widget set inherit this most useful behaviour (which is what I wanted in the first place :) On this note then once you devs get older (and your eyes start to fail) you'll learn to appreciate the value of being able to search for items by keyboard key ! Sometimes you just can't see things for looking but the keyboard will always find them :)
Simply doing that would break type-ahead on >1 character. Cycling when there is no further match would give you what you want most of the time, without breaking that.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320177 is about that and has been rejected Ubuntu bug about that too: https://launchpad.net/products/gtk/+bug/34635
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 320177 ***
As far as I can tell, that other bug is about changing the keyboard navigation in various vague ways. This is about adding extending the current completion keynav, without changing the current behaviour. Fair enough, if you don't want it, but some reason would be nice.