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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.
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.
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.