GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 48525
Allow grouping by file type
Last modified: 2021-06-18 15:29:17 UTC
Nautilus presently does not have the "Group by..." option demonstrated in this screenshot of Windows XP Explorer. ------- Bug moved to this database by unknown@bugzilla.gnome.org 2001-09-09 21:18 -------
can you please elaborate on this, what is this feature, why should nautilus have it???
From the "assimilate them back" department... ;-) They've actually got a few "cute/semi-useful" GUI hacks in this XP thing, and this is one of them. If you've used a recent MS Outlook, you've seen a similar effect in action. The idea is to provide a "group by" that works a lot like "sort by." For example: In Icon View, you might "sort by/type." However, it might be reasonably difficult to identify WHICH type a file is - let's ignore for the moment the nice Nautilus "second row" informations when "zoomed in," and assume there are 100 files, with no "extensions," of which 50 are PNG and 50 are JPEG. With "group by/type," a "header row" appears saying "Type: image/png" (better, something like "Type: Portable Network Graphics Image"), then 50 PNG files, then a header row for the JPEGs, and the JPEG files. (this is what the screenshot [lost in moving to this Bugzilla] used to show. it was from the WinXP "new toys" demo on MS's site, under "why upgrade now?" -- I'll see if I can dig it back up.) For the purposes of "themes," these header bars could be drawn using the "sidebar tab pieces" if that makes life easier than "inventing" something new. Type is the #1 reason for "Group By," but "day modified" (ignoring time-of-day for somewhat-obvious reasons), "owner," "group- owner," "size" (perhaps rounding off to one significant digit: e.g. "less than 1K," "about 1K," "about 9K," "about 4M"), and so forth can be useful under various circumstances. With Nautilus in particular, "group by/emblem" would be a very nice addition as well. I've no preference on dealing with multi-emblem files, though... Given my "druthers," I'd prefer to see a "group by type" working with no other options rather than wait to sort out the complexities of various "group by/*" alternatives, however. "sort by" functionality should still work within the groups, so e.g. "group by/type" and "sort by/name" would be a valid combination. This is usually seen in Outlook, so "list view" like this is familiar to a depressingly-large number of users. The "icon view" is (AFAIK) new to WinXP, but we can expect many users to learn to expect this before migrating to GNOME.
Thanks for the info, if you could attach a screenshot it would be nice...I'll keep it in mind for the future.
Created attachment 9147 [details] Screenshot: Windows XP Explorer "Show in Groups"
From: http://www.winplanet.com/winplanet/tips/4065/1/ Groupies. One of Windows XP's slickest file management features is the new way it groups files in Explorer. Handy for organizing files by type, name, date modified, or size, grouping makes it easier to find files, with each bunch clearly segregated by white space. To use groups, open Windows Explorer, then the desired folder. From the View menu, select "Arrange Icons by" and choose "Show in Groups." Repeat the procedure, but this time select a criterion -- name, size, type, or "modified" (which means "date modified") from the menu. With the last option checked, for example, files will be organized under headings such as "Today," "Yesterday," "Last Week," and "Last Month." ...and from http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/evaluate/usbltyx p.asp Show in Groups Show in Groups allows you to group your files by any detail of the file, such as name, size, type, or date modified. For example, if you group by file type, image files appear in one group, Microsoft Word files appear in another group, and Excel files in another. Show in Groups is available in the Thumbnails, Tiles, Icons, and Details views. Finally, from: http://www.pcworld.com/features/article/0,aid,81996,pg,2,00.asp XP: Get With the Group There are many new ways to view a folder's contents in XP, the most useful of which may be the 'Show in Groups' option on the 'Arrange Icons by' submenu. Choose View, Arrange Icons by, or right-click inside a folder and select Arrange Icons by, Show in Groups. Windows will arrange the icons in logical groupings based on your chosen sort order. For example, if the files are sorted by name, the groups will be the letters of the alphabet. If you sort by date, you'll get groups with names such as 'Yesterday', 'Last week', 'Last month', and 'Earlier this year'. Sorting by size will yield groups named 'Tiny', 'Medium', 'Large', and the like. It's no substitute for having a good file-storage system, but distributing large numbers of folders and files into these (somewhat) meaningful bins simplifies file management. Don't like it? Simply choose the command again to turn it off. "Attached" is a screenshot from "TechTV," which is more or less legible.
That sounds pretty slick :) Volunteering to code it? :)
Heh - gimme time... lotsa code in that there Nautilus. I'm actually looking it over to see if I can throw a skeleton in place, but no guarantees in the slightest... Just for grins, I'll take ownership of the bug, so I'll have only myself to blame for it languishing untouched.
One big problem you'll probably run into is that the icon container is private to nautilus so external views technically shouldn't use it (however darin one of the maintainers has offered to help anyone who wants to help move it out of nautilus and into eel). Also while your at want to implement automatic layout? (just kidding) good luck with this, sounds cool.
Before the coding gets to involved, I'd like to make a $0.02 suggestion to the 'Show in Groups' option. It would be nice to have a zoom feature associated with the feature as explained below. In XP, if type is the category and group-view is selected, the files are sometimes (although it's inconsistent) sorted by meta type. You may get something as follows: Images ------------------------- *.jpg *.png *.gif Movies -------------------------- *.mpeg *.mov *.avi Source (this isn't in XP, of course) ---------------------------------------- *.java *.c *.cpp etc. The zoom feature would increase the specificness of the groups as follows: JPEGS ---------------------------- (only jpeg files) GIFS ----------------------------- (only gifs) AVI --------------------------------- (only avi files) Sometimes I find myself wishing that I had this option when I'm in XP. And other times I wish I don't, i.e., I think that *.mpg and *.avi files are seperated in the XP Group View. This Gets On My Nerves^(TM). I hope this is clear enough of an explanation.
I've started hacking on the actual "grouper functions," to generate the groups from a list of files. When I get it to compile I'll start looking at integrating with Nautilus. At present, I'm working off the "manual layout" in Nautilus, thinking of "Group By" as a similar function to the "Clean Up By Name" feature. That is, rather than a "View" proper, this is a function that arranges the icon view. The title bars will be a whole new ballgame, however... This isn't how it SHOULD work, but it seems like a good way to get the functionality in place (especially on the back-end, grouper functions and such) without getting too tied up in the UI. I'm still running through the Nautilus mailing-lists and source code, by which I'm completely overwhelmed :-) so I'm not really clear on what the nautilus/eel issue concerns? Re: "meta-groups;" simplest way I see to handle this (short-term, anyway) would be MIME major types. That would NOT grab source files, since it looks like an awful lot of stuff is (sometimes arbitrarily) under application/* and text/*, but the image/*, audio/*, and video/* major types might be a good start for it. The "meta-group" functionality is something I'd really like to see (see also bug #84927), but needs to be implemented in the MIME capplet and some other places simultaneously, so I'm not planning to delve too far in that direction. Suggested major groupings would be "Images," "Sounds and Music," "Movies and Animations," "Programs and Scripts," "Programmer Files," "Text Documents," and then perhaps "Office Documents" (catch-all for Gnumeric, GnuCash, MrProject, and the like...) There seems no "good" way to ID "Programmer Files" (Source, Makefile, .in, .po) vs. "Text Documents" right now, and some "Text Documents" (logically) might be under application/* (technically)...? Using the control-concept "Zoom" seems confusing to me since Nautilus really does do a GUI Zoom (scaling icons); perhaps View Group Items No Grouping (as expected, disable feature) --- By Size (e.g. "Up to 10K, Up to 20K," ...) By General Type (e.g. "Images," "Sound and Music," ...) By Specific Type (e.g. "JPEG Photographs," ...) By Modification Date (e.g. "Today," "Tuesday," "March, 2001") By Owner (User) (e.g. "John Doe," "jsmith," "User #202") By Group Owner (e.g. "users," "Group #101") --- Reversed Order (This specifically mirrors the "View/Lay Out Items/" menu...)
*** Bug 88577 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Just a suggestion, inorder to avoid ui conflicts in the icon view it might be better to implement this as a new view (ie. View as groups).
*** Bug 300146 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Updating bug status...
*** Bug 457072 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This request is still actual. Dolphin, KDE4's file manager incorporated such thing and people are satisfied very much, 'cause it works well. GNOME can have that feature too :) .
It seems like a simplified way of doing this would be to allow the addition of a separating space in-between file types in the list view. For example, the normal list view of files and folders like: networkManager pdflib simpletest templateBlack tagsistant-0.1.20080104.tar.bz2 virtualbox_1.6.2-31466_Ubuntu_hardy_amd64.deb mapOfPHPFunctionality.gif simpletest_1.0.1.tar.gz ZendFramework-1.5.3-manual-en.tar.gz ZendFramework-1.5.3.tar.gz ZendStudio-5_5_0.tar.gz test.html 534481803_5754129c2c.jpg fingerpainting15.jpg invisible-graffiti.jpg Nautilus.jpg transformer_graffiti.jpg DnD_PA_Episode5.mp3 VIXY_AND_TONY_Rich Fantasy Lives.mp3 Bill.pdf CaretakerGazette_WebPage.pdf GIT.pdf PHP IDE creation review.pdf theoryoffun.pdf VirtualboxUserManual.pdf Screenshot.png Would get a spacing half-line or so inbetween different types, to become: networkManager pdflib simpletest templateBlack simpletest_1.0.1.tar.gz ZendFramework-1.5.3-manual-en.tar.gz ZendFramework-1.5.3.tar.gz ZendStudio-5_5_0.tar.gz test.html 534481803_5754129c2c.jpg fingerpainting15.jpg invisible-graffiti.jpg Nautilus.jpg transformer_graffiti.jpg DnD_PA_Episode5.mp3 VIXY_AND_TONY_Rich Fantasy Lives.mp3 Bill.pdf CaretakerGazette_WebPage.pdf GIT.pdf PHP IDE creation review.pdf theoryoffun.pdf VirtualboxUserManual.pdf Screenshot.png
Any chance to get this for 2.26?
No need for this to stay assigned.
If someone would like to implement this, then using GTK's "arrow" component seems best idea. http://www.flickr.com/photos/njpatel/2122840167/in/set-72157603637351266/
*** Bug 668518 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 168663 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version of Files (nautilus), then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.