Created attachment 178453 [details] [review]
[PATCH] fm-list-view: Jump to parent with left arrow key on collapsed row

Background

When browsing a hierarchy of folders in the list view with arrow keys, it is troublesome to get back to higher level from a long list of files or sub-folders inside a parent folder. This decreases the value of arrow key-based navigation, since it is easier to just scroll to the parent and collapse it with mouse click than to hit an up-arrow key repeatedly to reach the parent.

Solution proposal

Left-arrow key is currently used only for collapsing expanded folders. On collapsed folders and files it doesn't have any effect. In that case, instead of doing nothing, pressing left-arrow key could select (jump to) the parent folder of the current item. This would make collapsing current parent folder trivial by pressing left-arrow two times: first to reach the parent folder and then to collapse it. (If the current item would be an expanded folder, it would take three presses of left-arrow: first to collapse current folder and then to jump to and collapse the parent folder. This is almost equally trivial.)

Patch included

I wrote a small patch as an attempt to provide this functionality. Maintainers, please review it if it's worth including to mainline. The patch is based on gnome-2-32 branch.