GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 82567
Window path pop ups
Last modified: 2020-11-07 12:37:17 UTC
OK first i'm pretty sure this would involve an extension to the wm spec, but please consider leaving the bug open as a future idea. First some background, while doing work on making nautilus' ui better i came across a very important usability hole. Nautilus provides no spacial information to the user when not using the location bar. This is bad as providing users a sense of location is very important in a file manager. Originally i thought, why not just include the whole path name in the window border, but seth commented correctly that this would make use of the window list pretty useless. Someone else suggested the great idea of using macos9 style window popups. http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macos8/HumanInterfaceToolbox/WindowManager/ProgWMacOS8.5WindowMgr/WindowMgr.6.html these are really nice and could provide the user a really good spacial reference and help further the goal of making nautilus a desktop shell. what i'm thinking is the pop up would for $home would be something like ======== username home / These would be launched by single clicking on the window border while double clicking would still be shade. I know you like to avoid crack features but i think this is a good idea to consider for the future.
This seems like an ok hidden/advanced feature. If there's a real problem this is not a solution because it is pretty much invisible. Are there general cases where we want to be able to do things like this? File managers windows were the only that I could really imagine.
Seth i agree it's less than ideal for nautilus, i'm just not sure how to provide spacial reference for nautilus when not using the location bar since you don't want to have a complete path in the window title (this is what konqueror/explorer do).
I don't see this making it into the EWMH, since this seems pretty application-specific. Obviously we can't write "And then launch a new Nautilus window at the selected folder" into the WM spec. I'm gonna move this to nautilus. My suggestion: Make the tree view sync better with the main window, more like the way windows explorer works (double clicking a folder in the main window should expand the tree/select the appropriate folder also). This would provide another way to figure out the path to the current folder without using the location bar. But really, who doesn't use the location bar?
Moving back to metacity, this needs to be done in the wm, so when you are viewing a file you can click on its titlebar to open its parent folder very cool feature (ala macos 7).
*** Bug 152697 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Ken has a ("hacky") implementation in the link from bug 152697.
Doesn't Nautilus already have that feature? In spatial mode in the bottom left corner you have something very similar to "window path popups".
Yes, Nautilus has a (slightly awkward) implementation of this. This doesn't help the 99.9% of Gnome applications which are not called "Nautilus". :-)
What the heck would a thing like this do on a non-file-manager window? I suppose it could do something on the file dialog but that also already has a thing like this...
*** Bug 145400 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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