GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 47091
"." files should be visually distinguished from the rest of your files
Last modified: 2012-08-13 22:33:36 UTC
"." files (hidden files) when turned on by an expert user should somehow be distinguished from the rest of the files. Perhaps they should be partially transparent or greyed out. A larger scope to this would be to show things like permissions by how greyed out the file/folder is in general. This is a way past 1.0 feature idea thingy. Josh ------- Bug moved to this database by unknown@bugzilla.gnome.org 2001-09-09 21:03 -------
Changing to "old" target milestone for all bugs laying around with no milestone set.
Usability crew, do you agree with Josh?
Showing "hidden-ness" would probably be useful, although I'm not sure how we'd make it work very well in the high contrast themes. I guess you could use an emblem instead of transparency, although that would probably look clunky. The scope presumably shouldn't be confined to dot files, either, it should be whatever files are actually hidden. (Dot files, files listed in .hidden, and whatever else we hide these days.) Showing other things by "degree of greyed-outness" might not be so clever though... the problem with showing things comparatively is that, by definition, you always need something else nearby to compare against, and you can't always guarantee that in a file manager. ("Is this icon 50% transparent or 75% transparent?", "Are these two icons at the opposite sides of my screen the same transparency or different?" etc.)
*** Bug 405281 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 563113 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Cannot we just add an emblem or so, in order to make them different ?
I should also note that some people would configure nautilus to show files in list mode with associated icons at 25% size. Whatever the current method to assoc a file with an emblem would remain the same. The only difference is that there should be a gray version of these emblems to be used to represent hidden files.
They are visually differentiated by the fact that they aren't displayed by default, that they are sorted differently due to being prefixed by a ".". I don't think it makes sense to make them harder to use when someone has to go out of their way to make them visible. If they do that then they are probably interested in seeing them. So, using transparency or the like isn't a good idea.