GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 84511
Nautilus should use windows explorer style automatic layout in the fm icon view.
Last modified: 2012-08-14 21:58:36 UTC
Automatic layout in windows explorer is way cool. It's sort of a mixture of manual layout and sorted layout currently nautilus. Basically Its like manual layout in that the sorts are not hard sorted, so you can arrange by name, size etc.(similar to clean up by name though) The cool thing though is that you can drag and drop in the window and icons regardless of where the user places them in the window will always line up in a nice grid (sort of like an automatic snap to grid feature) with no spaces empty space between the icons. In addition when resizing the window, icons stay in a nice grid like in nautilus' current sorted layout, so the user never has to horizontally scroll. I think this type of layout should just be the way layout is handled in the fm icon view in nautilus. However for the desktop we should probably just stick with the current manual layout due to the issue of fixed window size.
Essentially, this is two things. (1) is a "sort by / the order I place the icons" (that name needs work!) sorting function; (2) is hacking into the "manual layout" DND code (about where the dialog used to ask "do you want to switch to manual layout now?") to detect DND within the window and adapt the sorting list. An invisible (3) is storing the sequence data somewhere (order of files = [ 'myfile', 'yourfile', 'thisfile', 'thatfile' ]), presumably in the metadata set.
We are deprecating manual layout for all but the Desktop.