Created attachment 152666 [details]
adjusted manually

Created attachment 152667 [details]
close and start nautilus and it resets

also reported at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/515057

*** Bug 608584 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I wonder how it should behave. Should it save a fixed pixel width (like the sidebar), or should it save a left/right ratio?

Personally I would be in favour of a left/right ratio rather than fixed width, this would also make it behave better when e.g. the screen or the screen resolution changes in between.

Yeah, and also when the sidebar visibility is toggled, so the extra space gets divided between panels according to the current ratio.

Thinking about it a little more (and even having started on a patch for this), I am not sure anymore remembering the splitter position is desirable. For me, having a clean 50:50 split upon triggering is actually a feature.

I am not even sure anymore if it's a good idea to remember the extra pane toggle status.

I guess it all comes down to how one uses the split view mode.

For people that want to have two panels all the time, remebering both the toggle status and the splitter position is clearly desirable.

For people that use normal, single pane Nautilus most of the time, and just activate the split view for occasional, temporary heavy duty filebrowsing, I imagine both settings should not be remebered. If such a user opens another window, he wants it to be single-pane. And the "extra pane" option should conceptually split the current view, not re-display a former split layout.

Personally, I belong more to the second group, and it was my understanding that this is also the group that Nautilus targets.

You're probably right there. But maybe it could be made an option for people that want do want the pane ratio to be saved?

Created attachment 154716 [details] [review]
Don't remember extra pane status

Alex agreed that the focus for Nautilus is not to be a permanent dual pane file manager. Attached patch removes the key that remembered the split view toggle status, so every new window starts "clean".

pushed this

I would respectfully ask that this not be pushed? I for one would like a defaulted dual-pane mode for nautilus & there are a couple of other people in Ubuntu-testing (Lucid) that would like this changeable with a gconf key. Please see this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1435333

Thank You
Dean Loros
Ubuntu-Testing

i would greatly appreciate it, if Gnome would remain simple to use,
but still be customizable via gconf or settings dialog.
We already have windows as a non customizeable OS, we don't need another.
So please, even if i would not use it, give the people who wants it the possibility to do it.

greetings
killigrew

I agree with Dean , this would be a welcome addition to nautilus
Thanks
Chris

That gconf key was removed because it was broken and confusing. In fact, it never was an "option" (something that is supposed to be adjustable by the user in some way) in the first place, but a key used for state-saving. Maybe some people have been confused by some blog posts which described the key in a wrong way.

The way it worked was that the key was toggled whenever the user clicked on the "Extra pane" menu item. So, if your last action on that item was to turn the extra pane on, a new Nautilus window would have an extra pane. If your last action was to turn it off, a new Nautilus window would not have the extra pane.

Basically, what this means is that if you:
- use Nautilus without the extra pane
- open a new Nautilus window dedicated to some FTP upload or whatever, where you toggle the extra pane on
- close that window again, and continue working in your normal Nautilus window for 2 hours
- fire up another Nautilus window, and wonder why it suddenly has the extra pane on

In short, the behaviour with that key was annoying for people that use the extra pane only temporarily, and those who don't want to use it at all (and clicked it accidentally, not knowing how to get rid of it again). It's a bit like with tabs: If you have 5 tabs in a window, that doesn't mean you want a newly opened window to also have 5 tabs, all of them displaying $HOME.

Note that I am not saying that there should not be a way to have the extra pane on startup. I am just saying that the key in question did not do what some people that want to have it back think it did.

Now, if people want to have the possibility to default to double pane mode, they're welcome to propose a design for that. Before implementing random options, it would be a good idea to think about the big picture, though.

Would it make sense to have session management for panes? Bookmarks that also store the extra pane status and the location of the inactive pane, if any? Or would a single gconf option be better? In that case, would it really make sense to i.e. fire up a dual pane window with both panes displaying the trash if the trash applet is clicked (a behaviour that annoyed the heck out of me personally with the start_with_extra_pane option already)?

Or maybe double pane mode should be a command line parameter? How would it fit with tabs? After all, there have already been requests to make

nautilus /home/foo /home/bar

open the two locations in tabs. Etc. pp.

However, this particular bug report doesn't sound like a sane place for such a discussion.

Holger: From what you said above it seem to me that the only reason for not having the option to remember dual panes is:

1. the behaviour with that key was annoying for people that use the
extra pane only temporarily, and those who don't want to use it at all (and
clicked it accidentally, not knowing how to get rid of it again).

With all due respect I don't see how that is a good enough to reason to make it completely impossible to use for those of us who don't go about clicking random options "accidentally". People can do a heck of a lot of things by accident and then wonder how they got there .. but that is what the IRC chats, forums and community is for ... otherwise how many other things should be totally removed from development!?

Am I missing some other major reason?

(In reply to comment #16)
> Holger: From what you said above it seem to me that the only reason for not
> having the option to remember dual panes is:

No, I didn't give any reason for not having an option. I gave the reasons for removing broken internal state saving behaviour that was present some time during the development cycle.

What I had to say about an option was in the paragraphs starting with "Now, if people want to have the possibility to default ...".

Ok, sorry for misunderstanding you there ... 

Still I don't quite understand the logic behind there being 5 options sitting together in the "View" menu, 4 of which are remembered in their last state the next time Nautilus is opened. Why is it that the dual pane option is not remembered? Is it too complex a task to 'fix' that?

I, for one, will be happy with any implementation that remembers dual pane setting.

Please remember the "extra pane" setting, and open it up again by default.

Holger: regarding ideas for implementation ... how about just making it possible for people to turn the feature on and off in the config files of Nautilus File Manager? Making this much impossible is a little cruel!

The extra pane has been ripped out of Nautilus. It doesn't exist anymore.

The Gnome way of solving problems. Fortunately, we have forks (like Nemo and Marlin).

Suppose it's time for Canonical to give Nautilus the proverbial boot!