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Nautilus 0.5 PR2 Released
bratislav writes: "Eazel just released the 2nd Preview Release for the upcoming GNOME filemanager, browser and general-nice-app Nautilus.
This new release comes with additional features, improved usability and a first look at Eazel Services. " The integrated network file system stuff is
interesting.
The "cp" is easier if you have filename completion. It is *far* easier if that destination directory has not been "opened" yet in the GUI.
What about D&D support?
Everybody should by now realize that the "stupid" Unix middle-button cut/paste is in fact exactly equivalent to D&D, except because you are not holding the mouse button down in the middle of an operation you suddenly realize how limited D&D is and complain that you cannot select the destination location without losing the selection.
I recommend that "middle mouse selection" be merged with D&D (and split from Alt+XCV cut/paste text selection). All "drop targets" should accept a middle-mouse click and should use the clipboard as the URL that is dropped.
Selection of an object anywhere should put the URL into the clipboard. You can then drag & drop like Windoze, or middle-mouse click to drop. Selection of text should allow the text to be dropped, the drop target decides if it should be treated as text or a URL (this will allow URL's to be pulled from email or other text sources)
For CLI there should be a program ("drag"?) that takes it's arguments and puts them all as URLs into the clipboard for dropping, and a program ("drop"?) that prints the URL's (with proper quoting) to stdout. This requires a method for a CLI program to identify the X server, I hope this can be done without too much ugliness.
It would be nice if terminal emulators accepted drops and middle-mouse clicks and caused the URL to be typed, perhaps with delimiting spaces and proper quoting.
for FILE in data0??0*.da? ; do sed 's/something/else/' $FILE > $FILE.done ; done
Sure, I like the shell. Yeah, you'll never make a GUI file manager as powerful as the CLI. BUT if we ever want to see Linux (or any *nix) on the desktop of NORMAL users, there needs to be something easier. It's pretty much already been proven that point and click is easier for most people to grasp than shell pipe streams. If we want to see our favorite OS, or any non-MS OS become common place, things like file management must be made easy for the user, not cryptic. This is the same reason why office suites, email clients, and any other GUI app is good. General users just want the computer to do what it does with little hassle, they're generally not looking for that killer CLI. They just want it to work.
The other thing here that is important is choice. Just because it's not your ideal file manager doesn't mean it isn't someone else's. I'd recommend emacs for serious text editing, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to a newbie, I'd probably recommend pico. Or if they have figured out how to get X working gnotepad. But is it bad to have all these editors? No. It gives me a choice to have an extensible programmable editor and people without the need to have an easy to use intuitive editor. Try to tell someone that C-x C-c is more intuitive then clicking 'File -> Exit'.
Most novice users are still figuring out what files are, let alone trying to remember a plethora of commands to attempt to manipulate them. Projects like this are necessary for any "fringe" OS to become commonplace on the desktop.
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
Helix GNOME is a GNOME distribution. Nautilus is a file manager for GNOME. Does that clarify the difference? - Maciej Stachowiak
Simple answer to your predicament:
:)
Click "Sort by MIME type" or whatever its called in the viewer window, then all the gifs are arranged together. Just drag a box around them, and drag 'em all to the right dir.
I'll agree with you that CLIs are better for SOME things, particularly maintenance-type tasks that can be done in bulk, scripted at the command line etc. However GUI file mangaers are great in that it's easy and fast to arbitrarily select things (because most of the time, you are probably concerned with the *content* of the files, not just the file extensions etc.) and to quickly visualise and recognise things by their icons. Maybe there are some people with an amazing ability to trawl through text, but it's much easier for most people to find the things that you're looking for by skimming over the icons. The colours, shapes etc. are all visual cues to help you recognise things, while on a CLI, you have to parse the text yourself because they all look more or less similar.
Also for most people, its much easier to actually work with things in a GUI than it is in a CLI, because of the recall/recognition memory thing. It's much easier to right-click on a floppy disk icon and choose format from the list of options, then choose a few options that are presented to you, than it is to remember the correct syntax for mk2fs and all the command like arguments, and if you forget, then looking up man pages.
You talked about being pretty, keep in mind that 'Graphical' is only 1/3rd of 'Graphical *User Interface*'. It's not just about the pretty pictures
On the whole, KDE typically wins the award for first implementation of something. GNOME is typically a bit behind, but wins the award for the BETTER implementation.
Now I'm not a KDE or GNOME guru, but I would like to see some facts that support that statement. Which parts of KDE2 is badly implemented and where does GNOME have a BETTER implementation?
Greetings Joergen
The Nautilus install is similar to the Helix install and runns relatively smoothly (RH6.2)
RH7 is not yet supported. Total install is about 80Mb. It has support for online file space similar to WebDAV. Upload is earlier this evening was approx 128kb and integrates seemlessly into the file manager.
Overall interaction is not exactly zippy, however it does seem much more stable than the last incarnation.
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
ftp://ftp.c-60.org/pub/nautilus/ http://www.c-60.org/pub/nautilus/
It seems that Nautilus may be too little too late. Had it been released before KDE 2, then matters might be different.
ftp://ftp.heckard.com/pub/eazel/ go for it!
I'm sorry, but I gotta say that this nautilus thing is so very slick.
Sure, currently its slow and buggy, but everything is falling in to place. PR2 is leaps and bounds ahead of PR1 in these terms, plus lots of extra fun functionality. I'm fairly confident that the eazel guys can take care of performance issues, and get things running like a real application some day soon.
Icons: There's something nice about being able to actually visualize all your files and your contents. No other filemanager I've seen does such a good job of putting a preview of the file in the icon.
Keyboard: This thing actually has working keyboard shortcuts so often missing from alot of gnome programs (namely gmc). Eazel's focus on getting the user experience correct gives me high hopes that I will actually be able to use this thing without too much mouse action. And it has the benefit of the handy gtk/menu quick key reassignment.
Services: Currently the software catalog is somewhat limited, but it was sure nice to go click and install Maelstrom. I love this game, but not enough to go search linuxgames, try to find an rpm or tar file, read the installation instructions, etc. The online storage is something that's being done for other operating systems, but the current purely web based solutions are quite lame. This is a service that probably would never hit linux without eazel.
Will there be a standardized API for making your own services? I don't know if this is something eazel is even thinking about.
gnome-vfs: I'd be interested in comparisons with KDE2's generic filesystem/IO layer.
Metafile: The xml file for storing directory state seems to me like a very good idea. It would even allow a transparent ftp session to layout icons, it survives being put into archive files, it inheriets the multiuser security model when you're browsing other people's directories and its easy for me to see and inspect when I'm in bash/vi mode.
Nautilus shows a whole mess of promise, the only unfortunate thing is its not quite ready to actually use yet.
It troubles me to see first Konqueror, and now Eazel chasing the whole windoze file management nightmare.
KFM was elegant, easy to configure, and every directory or object kept track of its own settings. With konqueror, we lost a lot of that as it became more of an application than a file manager.
Sometimes simplicity is a good thing. Both KDE and Gnome are losing sight of that. Instead of having a slick, elegant filemanager that seamlessly integrates several other parts of the environment, we are ending up with a big ugly mess that isn't an efficient way to work.
Just my former OS/2 WPS view rearing its ugly head again. The developers creating these environments could learn a lot by reading this.