GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 612203
double use of F3 destroys tab structure irreversibly
Last modified: 2010-03-11 18:45:40 UTC
I like the extra pane option F3 in lucid, but I see the following usability hazard: say I have a lot of tabs open and I hit F3 to open an extra pane. Then I realize that I don't need the extra pane and hit F3 again. The result is that all my tabs have vanished because nautilus keeps the newly created pane when I hit F3 twice. There's two solutions for this imho: 1) the easy solution would be to keep the old pane active when I hit F3. This way double F3 would keep the old pane alive instead of the new one. 2) the more complex solution would be to make sure that all tabs stay alive when I close an extra pane. So if I close a pane with different tabs, then all of those tabs will be attached as tabs to the remaining pane. Or at least all those tabs except the one I'm closing.
Closing the extra pane is a bit like closing a window - the pane is destroyed, the location(s) it displays are lost, and you need to visit them again if you want them back. In so far it's consistent with closing and re-opening a window. As for your proposed solutions, I don't agree at all with (1). Why would one want to keep the inactive pane? That sounds very unnatural to me. I also don't agree with (2). I don't see any point in automatically moving the tabs from a to-be-destroyed pane to the active pane. When closing a window, you wouldn't want your tabs to be moved to the next-best window either. I can however see your point of inadvertendly opening the extra pane, closing it again right away, and then wondering why you don't end up where you started. To preserve your original layout in this case, I could imagine that the left (old) pane stays active on extra-pane invokation. That way, tabs would be preserved accross multiple F3 presses. (The original motivation behind moving focus to the right pane was to "focus that new element that was just explicitely requested". I don't have a strong oppinion about it though.) As for the wish to preserve certain tabs on the to-be-destroyed pane, in my oppinion a better fix would be to allow dragging tabs between notebooks or onto the root window (which is bug 607512).
> I could imagine that the left > (old) pane stays active on extra-pane invokation. That's actually what I meant by (1).
(In reply to comment #2) > That's actually what I meant by (1). Upon re-reading, that's not only what you meant, but also what you wrote ;) I agree that this would be an adequate fix.
Fixed in git master. Thanks for the report!
No problem, thanks for fixing!