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The Captains of Nautilus
GonzoJohn writes "The official GNOME filemanager Nautilus was originally developed by Eazel as part of their plan to bring usability and beauty to the Unix desktop. Today Nautilus is maintained by veteran GNOME hackers Alexander Larsson and Dave Camp. Being such a core application in the GNOME desktop it is the topic of many discussions in and around GNOME. In a recent survey on gnomedesktop.org an interview about Nautilus was at the top of the wishlist. So to let everyone get the inside scope on what is happening with Nautilus currently I got hold of Alexander and Dave for a small interview.""
I've run GNOME 1.4 on my 166 pre-MMX with 80mb ram under some different Linuxes and BSDs, and if you make your own .xsession and just start what you want, it isn't bad at all. Did you know that GNOME is also customizable? Never tore into customizing more than the panel, I'm an fvwm2 guy...
:( ) I don't know if this is something that has been fixed, or if the developers would say 'Don't run it as root you dummy'...
On Nautilus, the only thing that I have run into (16 or 18 month old release) is that if for convenience I want to launch Nautilus as root, it can eat FAT32 partitions for breakfast (now I can only see the partition from Linux
Look, if you need to drag and drop files (organize that mp3 collection), it's a real nice tool...
At the end of the article, when asked about what they are looking forward to in Gnome 2.2...
.org, as correctly linked above.
Dave: I'm also looking forward to seeing some apps beginning to mature. Galeon2 is one of the ones I'm waiting eagerly for, and Rhythmbox would be nice to have too."
They got the link to Rhythmbox wrong. Should be
Nothing wrong with the RH 8 version. Its still KDE and still has all of the KDE apps. Konq is still there, Kmail is still there, Kate is still there. How is this no longer KDE?
Redhat 8.0's KDE equals KDE plus a theme. Don't like it? Change the freaking theme.
Stop the FUD.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I would read the Human Interface Guidlines as mentioned in other replies. Next I would get my hands on a Mac and play with it. I hate to say it, but Finder is one of those things you need to experience to see the difference.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Check out xfce. Theoretically, it is somewhere between fvwm2 and GNOME. Light & quick, with GNOME integration to boot.
Use the best of the gnome world, without the cruft.
but hate the speed. If you have several files in a directory, Naut is unusable. When in linux I have two windows shares mounted. One is my mp3's, the other is docs and downloads. Trying to browse them with Naut is a non-starter. The same directories under Konq work fine and come up instantly.
Like I said, I do like Naut, but until it speeds up about a 1000% when browsing remote directories it will never have a place on any PC I use.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
They can't integrate Mozilla into any Gtk 2/Gnome 2 apps until the Gtk 2 version of Mozilla is released. This is also why there is no galeon 2 as of yet. Once Gtk 2 Mozilla is released expect to see the Mozilla view come back to Nautilus (actually, if we're lucky it will be a galeon 2 view).
On the GNOME2 prefs thing, yeah yeah, it's a hot issue. Personally, I found GNOME1.4 to be a hideous mess, and love the clean feel of GNOME2. But when somebody is pleased with something, they don't go around flaming people do they, so they don't get any attention (i was a convert from kde3)
Some peoples issues, in case this whole trollfest passed you by:
The lack of preferences: GNOME2 had a lot of stuff removed. Most of it was pointless bloat, BNC binary clock anybody? Some of it were features that were valued by their users, but were so called "crack" features as far as the gnome2 developers were concerned, ie they existed purely to satisfy a tiny minority of people. The theory went that so called "crack" options (a good example would be the, please break my clipboard again pref in KDE3) were ususally just to either work around bugs, or to make up for the fact that some people had got used to a behaviour that actually made no sense. Every pref has a cost in terms of UI bloat, so they were removed.
Some such prefs will get back in to gnome2. If people can make a convincing case for bringing them back (and "well I liked it" is not classed as convincing) then they could well be brought back. But they don't want the fast and clean v2 to regress to the bag of bloat that was 1.4
GConf. I dunno why people poke this so much. For those who don't know, it's kind of like a registry. Unfortunately the word "registry" is a loaded term, because only Windows has ever had one, and the Windows registry really sucks. GConf is not like that. For starters, the keys are all documented, and they are all stored in text files in your home directory (i believe xml by default). It's well organized (mostly). No, it doesn't need a daemon, it's just most apps use it because that means the configuration and the app can be logically separate - ie you can reconfigure an app while running not just from the config panel, but also from the command line, the GConf editor, a remote machine etc. I think GConf is a great idea, and I wish more apps used it, but it is misunderstood a lot. Another reason that it's used is so that you can have "power user prefs" without bloating the UI, the theory being that power users can use the GConf editor. It works quite well really.
Metacity: unfortunately even I (and I generally think the gnome people have the right idea) think Havoc goes too far. Metacity is very, very "thin" indeed. Although it's not true he doesn't implement any new features, the problem is only stuff that's basically very useful to everybody gets in. Other stuff, stuff that's useful only to perhaps some people (like people who find minimize animations irritating) are ignored. Havoc says "if you want to switch off the animation, there's probably something wrong with the animation", and he's right, there is something wrong which is that it's ugly and slow. But some people on the bug commented that "no matter how fast it is, I'd still find it irritating", but Havoc won't even accept patches others have written to add a GConf key! Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Havocs work esp wrt to freedesktop.org standards, but Metacity does need to grow a bit - the far superior window management of Linux to pretty much anything else is actually a selling point I've found when talking to Windows/Mac users.
Attitude of the developers: the GNOME2 developers have (un)fortunately decided that they are not writing a desktop for geeks, Rasterman can do that, they are writing a desktop for non-geeks. As such, they sometimes come out with comments like "normal users would never need that feature, so it's just bloat" (I'm paraphrasing). As you can imagine, most of gnomes users believe that they as real users are more important than some imaginary, potential users in the future, and big flamage results. I'm not going to comment either way, as it's true that a big problem with Linux usability is the "by geeks, for geeks" mentality, but it's also true that projects that don't listen to their users ..... are what? Are pointless? Will die? I don't know.
As for Nautilus - well, I'd rather they dropped it and used ROX which has the advantage of not being originally written by idiots, very fast and doesn't kowtow to Explorer. It's the sort of thing you could embed. For many of the current gnome users though, they (like me) just use the command line - the real Linux answer to Explorer. Stuff like Konqui and Nautilus are perhaps best thought of as training wheels.
This is exactly why I'm writing my own file manager for GNOME.
Nautilus just wasn't written to handle the things that make a file manager competetive these days.
The one I am writing is called GFileRunner. Its not finished yet, but it is already fairly usable.
I'm currently working on the finishing touches to a module subsystem so that GFileRunner can support these types of things. That will hopefully make the GNOME desktop more of a competitor with KDE.
-- Competition brings improvement.
You're enthusiasm for Apples products is great, but I feel I give an alternative viewpoint. I've used the Finder, Explorer, Nautilus, Konqueror, Rox, and the command line, so I have quite a bit to compare it to.
I feel the Finder sucks bigtime:
The NeXT style columns view (the default) is awful. I found I couldn't get it to display as much info as Explorer could in the same space, I found that copying between two locations meant I had to open 2 finder windows or engage the rather feeble tree widget. It wastes space, the big icon/preview is very pretty, but 90% of the time useless as I already know what the filetype is, it just takes up a big fat wad of space that could have been used for something else.
It's slow. No really, even on 10.2, I could watch as it rerendered the Finder on a complex directory structure. Quartz Extreme me all you like, I didn't try it with that, as the drivers for the card in the machine I was using didn't support it (the owner had upgraded it himself). Rox is fast. The Finder is slow.
Primitive typing: in Rox if I view the properties of a file, the "file" program will scan it and try to figure out what exactly it is. It'll say for instance "Screenshot.png: PNG image data, 1024 x 768, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced" or "ASCII Text, long lines". The Finder just says "Document" for any type that isn't explicitly registered with it, at least rox tries to guess based on some reasonably smart heuristics
Apparently no Rox/Nautilus type-ahead tab complete. This isn't a "hard" feature, once you know it's there anybody can use it, I've seen die hard Windowsers pick it up in less than 10 seconds. If the Finder has it, it didn't make it particularly obvious. Rox has a great implementation, just hit / and use it like you would the CLI, you can see it scan through the directories as you type, and get visual feedback as it matches. Nautilus2 has something similar though not as slick if you press Ctrl-L
No address bar? I feel sure it can mount FTP drives etc as it can do the iDisk, but there's no obvious place to type in any URLs for that.
You clearly like the Finder toupsie, but then you like anything that is Apple, and hate anything that isn't, this is a theme that comes across in most of your posts. File management is very much a personal thing - don't assume your view is the "right" view. Comments like "I can't explain, you must just use it" don't help your arguments by the way.
You are 100% correct. Konqueror is, in fact, not much other than a container for various KParts. It's really, really easy to write software in KDE to view images, play music, etc. etc. simply by writing a few lines of code and including the correct KPart. C++ is crucial for this; GNOME will forever be hampered by their choice of C and the subsequent lack of first-class objects. When will Nautilus be able to copy files via SSH from a remote server and upload them via FTP to another server, all graphically? (In Konq, just open a couple of panes, type fish://servername and ftp://servername2, and then drag and drop. It's amazing.) Type audiocd:// to manipulate music. And so forth.
The NeXT style columns view (the default) is awful. I found I couldn't get it to display as much info as Explorer could in the same space, I found that copying between two locations meant I had to open 2 finder windows or engage the rather feeble tree widget. It wastes space, the big icon/preview is very pretty, but 90% of the time useless as I already know what the filetype is, it just takes up a big fat wad of space that could have been used for something else.
.png, .jpg, etc. are supposed to be noticed by the finder and passed to QuickTime for this same sort of detection, all behind the scenes. It happens in MacOS 9, I'm not sure why this feature is missing in OS X. As for other types, this was why file/creator tags where good: The Finder has a database of all files of type "APPL" which are the Mac equivelant of a .exe file. All APPLs which dealt with files where supposed to have a "BNDL" type resource (we love four-char codes on the Mac ;-) ) and in this was a listing of the (again, four-char code) program creator type and the various files it was designed to handle. So when encountered with a new file, the Finder simply checked it's link table to all the Apps and if there was no creator type, found the first applicable matching file type and set the new file's tags appropriately. Mac OS X needs a file extension registry as well as the type/creator registry (it's not like the Windows registry, mind you. File matching only.), but it seems to lack one.
Use the list view, and navagate with the arrow keys (or by typing the name of a file) and pressing Apple-O. It's like a graphical command-line that way.
It's slow. No really, even on 10.2, I could watch as it rerendered the Finder on a complex directory structure. Quartz Extreme me all you like, I didn't try it with that, as the drivers for the card in the machine I was using didn't support it (the owner had upgraded it himself). Rox is fast. The Finder is slow.
The Finder doesn't take up memory with caching all the directory structures, just the most recent. So the rendering is slow due to the Finder reading the icons + positions + the directory listing and all the other info from the disk. Buy a faster disk, or for a nice test, open a folder, watch it render slow, close it, and immediately open it back up. Ahh. Besides, by the time you find what you want, it's usually done drawing anyway. This is nitpicking.
Primitive typing: in Rox if I view the properties of a file, the "file" program will scan it and try to figure out what exactly it is. It'll say for instance "Screenshot.png: PNG image data, 1024 x 768, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced" or "ASCII Text, long lines". The Finder just says "Document" for any type that isn't explicitly registered with it, at least rox tries to guess based on some reasonably smart heuristics
Ahh, now we're getting somewhere. This has been a problem since OS X, because type and creator codes are no longer required, and thus files dont' always have them. The most common types such as
Apparently no Rox/Nautilus type-ahead tab complete. This isn't a "hard" feature, once you know it's there anybody can use it, I've seen die hard Windowsers pick it up in less than 10 seconds. If the Finder has it, it didn't make it particularly obvious. Rox has a great implementation, just hit / and use it like you would the CLI, you can see it scan through the directories as you type, and get visual feedback as it matches. Nautilus2 has something similar though not as slick if you press Ctrl-L
A simple RTFM solves this. Use the technique I described above, type the name until the highlight matches, and Apple-O, or any other keyboard shortcut you'd like, depending of course, on what you want to do with the file. You can actually move quite fast once you get the hang of it, it comes as natural as typing and using the shift key.
No address bar? I feel sure it can mount FTP drives etc as it can do the iDisk, but there's no obvious place to type in any URLs for that.
Ahh, yes this feature coudl stand out a little more but the Finder is no Web Browser and therefore we keep this tucked away under the Go menu. Choose "Connect To Server..." or, for speed-shortcutting, use Apple-K (Konnect, C interferes with Copy). You can also add a button to the toolbar and click it if you so desire, go to View->Customize Toolbar... and drag and drop the buttons from the window to the toolbar to arrange.
You clearly like the Finder toupsie, but then you like anything that is Apple, and hate anything that isn't, this is a theme that comes across in most of your posts. File management is very much a personal thing - don't assume your view is the "right" view. Comments like "I can't explain, you must just use it" don't help your arguments by the way.
You clearly haven't used the Finder much, IamTheRealMike, but then you also seem to not care because it is Apple. This is a theme that came across in your post. Dont' assume you need to tell someone off because they defended their view - if I was to bad mouth the Linux kernel I'd be killed on this website, by all the slashdotters doing the same. Give it another try, look around carefully, Apple does things differently for a reason. You won't be a power user in a day. That's why Apple's interface is great, it does things logically but not the way other interfaces too. There is too much similarity with other file borwsers that limits them in some respects.
Of course, choice is yours, and I'm not suggesting you "switch", I'll leave Apple's ad dept up to that. It's like switchng from an automatic to a stick. Sure it's different, sometimes harder, but some people liek to drive stick alot more. (Ohh the trolls will have a field day with that!)
Toupsie: While I agree with you on the Finder, that was rather vague. Perhaps next time point out some of the things you feel make the Finder strong?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Perhaps he meant comments by people that have actually tried Nautilus 2.
I don't believe any of those above have actually TRIED Nautilus 2 before bitching about it.
And if they have, then they haven't tried it with decent hardware.
GNOME 2.0 isn't meant for people with P166MMX and 64MB ram. It might get closer with GNOME 2.2 as some memory leaks and performance bits are being fixed. This still doesn't change that GNOME 2 (and Nautilus) is meant for machines of around Celeron 350+ and 128MB ram+. RAM is especially important.
Nautilus seems to scale very well with hardware. In opening Windows, thumbnailing, and switching directories it is the fastest file manager on my Athlon XP 1800+ with 256MB ram. It seems quite a bit faster than Konqueror (for RH 8) and Explorer (for XP).
On a PIII 600 with 128MB ram it still opens new windows in around the same time as XP explorer, and bit faster than Konqueror. It's other operations are around the speed of Konqueror.
You can see the same pattern on my laptop with Red Hat 8 (PIII 733 with 256MB ram).
The most important part however if your Linux/UNIX file managers are slower than explorer is:
turn on UDMA for your disks. Not all distributions do that by default. And almost none manage to get the settings totally right.
Windows 2000 explorer might be faster. I haven't tried to compare that one with Nautilus, but I'm actually pretty confident that with the new GNOME performance profiling done by WIPRO/SUN, it will be faster than that too.
For those suggesting ROX filer as a speedier alternative, more power to you. I do not like it that much, but some people seem to love it.