GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 317863
Ability to switch off the new "expanding folder" beahaviour and revert to 2.10 behaviour.
Last modified: 2011-02-25 20:28:18 UTC
With version 2.12 Nautilus introduced a new behaviour whereby directories are displayed with a small arrow to the right of the directory name. Clicking this arrow will now expand the directory to show all owned directories/files as child nodes of the current directory. Whilst this may be of benefit when using spatial mode (where there is no visible directory treeview showing the file system hierarchy) for a user such as myself who always uses browser mode (and who hates spatial mode) this behaviour makes the display extremely cluttered and confusing as it simply duplicating functionality from the directory tree control in the left hand pane of Nautilus. I would therefore like the option to switch off this behaviour such that the right hand pane of Nautilus will behave in the manner it did at version 2.10 i.e. the right hand pane will not display the small arrow, and when double clicking a directory in the right hand pane the user will "browse into" the directory. Thankyou. Other information:
Thanks for your bug report! Not many other Nautilus users seem to share your opinion, at least to my knowledge no other bug with a similar request has been filed. Thus, I'm lowering the priority of this report. If you have enough time: Just hack away and feel free to come up with a patch which implements this functionality, and adds a new (gconf-only) preference, maybe stored as "/apps/nautilus/list_view/expand_subdirectories" key.
If only it was that simple. *** Not all Linux users code on Linux *** If I could just "hack away" at the code then I would not have reported the bug. I would have simply performed the hack on a local copy of the code and would have offered my hack as a patch. I do not currently code on Linux which is why I am reporting the bug in the first place. Additonally I am raised the issue as the Nautilus devs seem intent on forcing people into adopting their wretched spatial mode (which I consider a flawed, obsolete, paradigm for browsing a file system) and I just want to remind them that there are many users who do not use Spatial mode and who want Nautilus to remain a useable file system browser in non spatial mode. Oh well.
I would just like to add that, while I can see how this could be useful, I personally do not like this behaviour. An option to turn this off to make the interface less cluttered would be appreciated.
Raptor: Christian is not requiring you make a patch, just (IMO politely) suggesting/wanting it. There is only so much time nautilus developers have and if someone else contributes a patch it allows the nautilus developers to fix more bugs. Of course not everyone is able to code on Linux. Note that there is a option to use browser mode.
Created attachment 123389 [details] [review] add option to switch off expanding folder behaviour 0) Here's a patch against (almost?) current trunk to add an option to disable the current expanding folder behaviour in List View. Basically it is an option to let the List View behave as a list and not as a tree. 1) I'm not happy with the label of the option in the patch, but that label is not important just now. The View tab of the preferences dialog is way too long with this patch. See bug #561797 for my suggestion to move the "Tree View Defaults" stuff to another tab (and to rename the "Tree View" to just "Tree"). 2) I would actually prefer this not to be an option but the default behaviour. (That would have made it much easier to implement this too.) The current List View is not a list but a tree and should actually be called "Tree View". It is at odds with the spatial philosophy of the non-browser file manager. (Although I do not use Browser Mode I can see why in comment #0 the current List View is considered "cluttered" and "confusing" in Browser Mode. ) 3) I did not run into upgrade issues with this patch. It seems to (correctly) start with expanders shown in List View, so no surprises for those who do not share my opinion. 4) Looking forward to the feedback. Patch is tested (slightly altered) against 2.24.1.
First issue I found with the patch of comment #5: it doesn't collapse rows that are expanded if List View mode is switched form expandable to non-expandable (by toggling the option). I'll try to post an update soon (might take a few days).
Not a Nautilus dev: Pretending that the list view with expanders is a Tree view (just in the UI) sounds like a nice idea to me. Noticed that the patch in at least one place used tabs where the original code used spaces. E.g.: > +static gboolean list_view_show_expanders_auto_value;
(In reply to comment #7) > Pretending that the list view with expanders is a Tree view (just in the UI) > sounds like a nice idea to me. Could you please elaborate? What should be done in the UI (besides showing the expanders) to pretend to have a Tree view?. > Noticed that the patch in at least one place used tabs where the original code > used spaces. > > E.g.: > > +static gboolean list_view_show_expanders_auto_value; Thanks. The current code already seems to mix spaces and tabs. I'll try to fix it as I go along.
Created attachment 123422 [details] [review] add option to switch off expanding folder behaviour (second version) 0) Collapsing expanded tree_views turned out to be trivial. 1) I decided to always collapse the tree if the expander option is turned off: it's trivial to code, collapsing trees seems to be a fast operation and this is done in reaction to a manual operation that one will do quite infrequently anyway. 2) Removed a few white space fixes in the original patch. I might find the courage to fix the white space in .../fm-list-view.c in a few days (it's quite a mess now). 3) Tested something similar on 2.24. This patch is untested (didn't even try top compile it).
We have compact view now, we don't show the sidebar selector anymore, and sorry, but we won't add another option just to disable expanders. Closing as WONTFIX.