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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 understand this is an early post, but I've seen that concept elsewhere before. When do you start to care as much about your explorer application as, say, your window manager ? Isn't this whole explorer metaphor quite new to *NIX, and borrowed from win/mac OSes ?
I don't think the gnome community should become as depend on nautilus as windows users are on explorer. It's a nice shell, granted, but it's an app like many others, and many users don't... use it.
My point is, that kind of integration is just not the way to go for desktop on linx. If you want to be recognized, don't follow the (questinable) ideas of others.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Ever since the release of GNOME2 threads of rebellion have surfaced in the community over the increased emphasis on corporate users over experienced GNOME users. Havoc, 'The point about corporate users is that they don't install the OS, or install their own hardware, or have to configure NFS mounts, etc. There's an admin to sort that stuff out.' This emphasis has lead to the removal of much of the flexibility inherant in GNOME2's predecessor. The fruits of this change have begun to surface, here, and here, and here.
Apparently, according to top GNOME developer Havoc Pennington, linux users are not Real Users^TM. Havoc, 'The only way to collect input from real users instead of Linux enthusiasts is to do user testing. We can't do user testing for every decision.'
Although I understand the need for the newbie user, I've never understood why Nautilus is so important to the initiated GNOME user. I very rarely have a need to use a graphical file manager, and when I do, I'd prefer one that wasn't buggy as snot and slower than tar. No matter what version I've tried, its always had problems. I don't believe I've ever been actively using it for more than a few minutes where it hasn't crashed (don't even bother on Solaris...) Its new and large, so I understand it will take a while, but I don't know that it is ready to have a central role in GNOME.
Yes, its nice eye candy, but how much is it actually used, aside from showing new users that you can drag and drop and preview just like Explorer?
I find Konqueror more usable, but it still seems like an afterthought. On both KDE and GNOME, the whole Desktop Icons and Folders scheme seems so out of place -- like a bad impulse no one should have acted on. I'm not anti-Nautilus, I just don't know that the whole GUI file manager application is as important as people make it out to be.
I'm not flaming, just wondering if anyone else doesn't feel the same.
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.
Hear, hear! Long live the COMMAND LINE!
Well, I've never met the opportunity to use Finder... as well as MacOS in general.
As a developper, I find the enthusiasm of your reply quite interesting. Can you provide examples/urls about the features of Finder you find superior to Nautilus' ? I mean, features not also found on win platforms ?
No flame intended, I'm just interested in the UI concepts of as many platforms as I can handle.
Cheers
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
"In a recent survey on gnomedesktop.org an interview about Nautilus was at the top of the wishlist."
Yeah, as in, "I wish it was usable."
(Relax, kidding... kind of)
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.
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
Yes, but there is nothing wrong in borrowing an idea as long as it is a good idea
Yes, but I can bet that an application like Nautilus is necessary if you ever want to have a decent market share on the desktop . By decent I mean 10% or more.
I would love to hear from you or someone else what kind of a replacement you can offer for a user-friendly file manager.
I am a KDE user, and I love Konqueror. The little bit I tried Nautilus it looked very good to me too. Being an experienced UNIX user, I do most things from the console, but many times I find myself using konqueror just because it is more efficient for the specific task. For example, a recursive copy of a local directory tree to an ftp server where I also want to rename stuff on the fly.
I guess my point is very simple: regular users (and this means 99% of the potential users) need a powerfull yet user-friendly file manager, or something else that let's them access all kinds of files, open them, copy remove them, manage removable devices and so forth. If you come up with a better metaphore it is more than welcome. Otherwise, GNOME needs to keep going with Nautilus.
I can think of several specific examples, and a few "iffy" ones off the top of my head. But citing examples wouldn't explain it well.
I think you would gain the apple Human Interface Guide. It's a free download at developer.apple.com (that might be wrong url, I use bookmarks). It's about a 2 hour read (assuming you know basic desktop usage already.. as you do) and it helps explain alot about how an interface should be designed.
I think the biggest thing to be learned from apple is the following.
Never impliment a new metaphor unless there is no way to fit the new technology into the old one. If you have to impliment a new meatphore, then make it build on the basics of the old metaphor, but make it clearly diffrent so as to avoid confusion.
A great example is how they handled CD burners, as they aern't a random access file the old meatphor didn't work as well. They built on the old metaphor to build temporary "virtual disks" then you burn them using the old metaphor.
I live in a giant bucket.
Yuk. IMO, Finder wasn't perfected in OS X, it was butchered into that awful NeXT fil manager.
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
Captain Nemo, I've always respected what you've done under the sea. You've made it safe from Nazis and Mermen alike!
All hail Nemo, Captain of Nautilus!
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).
http://rox.sourceforge.net
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.
The 10th time is something like this:
Given directory foo with the following files:
a.txt
1.hlp
bb.doc
123.wpd
memo to smith
lunch meeting
dog.jpg
cat.gif
homepage.html
Move cat.gif, "memo to smith", bb.doc, and 1.hlp to directory bar.
In a gui, you hold the ctrl key down and it takes about 7 clicks total. From the command line, there's not much you can do to make it fast since the files have nothing in common.
This comes up pretty frequently for end users. For sysadmins the story is different, but most end users don't have files that lend themselves to regular expressions or something that makes the cli efficient. The file names and contents are almost random, so there's no efficient way to group them.
Actually, thanks to filename completion in any standard shell, you'll list those files with about 9 keystrokes. Add to that "mv " and whatever the "directory bar" is, and you have accomplished your goal very efficiently. There is no way that I would be able to mouse around that quickly to choose the files and drag them somewhere!
Reality or nothing.
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.
I wasn't going to respond to this, but since it seems to have gotten enough credence to get modded up to a five, it seems I should.
/. are (correctly) ignored by GNOME. People who pour their entire fucking lives into GNOME, like Havoc, get a lot more respect. Flaming him merely proves how ignorant you are.]
GNOME is not being hijacked. Hijacking is when captains and paying passengers are forced by outside forces to go someplace they don't want to go. GNOME is not being forced to go anywhere- the captains- the core maintainers- believe that what GNOME is doing is the right thing. Havoc, Alex, Dave, Jeff Waugh, John Fleck, and tens of other core people believe they are doing the right thing- they wouldn't do it otherwise. Those people have built GNOME with their sweat and tears, and if they feel that a simpler, more usable GNOME is the way to go, then they have every right to take GNOME that way.
Everyone else? All the hitchhikers who haven't given their time to GNOME? It's hard to hijack GNOME from them- if they haven't contributed, it is not their GNOME to take away. But that's the most beautiful part about Free Software. It doesn't matter that they don't like GNOME's direction- it's all still there for them to use, all several hundred thousand lines of it. If you disagree with where GNOME is being 'hijacked' to, there is more than one way to go. Fork it. Or use KDE. Or use GNOME1.4 until the end of time. Or (best option) put your own blood sweat and tears in and fight to make GNOME2 better. That's the option I've chosen, it's the option others have chosen. And I firmly believe it's the best choice I can make.
[Final note: People who post as ACs to
IAAL,BIANLY
Indeed I have a friend who has shown me Gfilerunner - very nicely done, it does look like it has promise.
Keep up the good work.
You are totally and completely correct in saying that competition brings improvement. Linux is in a situation with its DE's that no other platform in the world has been in. We have a real chance to create some truly exciting desktop environments - and I think we are now getting there, all because of the competition.
Thanks for chiming in! It is good to hear from people who are ACTIVELY doing something for the community instead of all of these whiny slashdotters that never get off their duff and just put everyone down.
Derek
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?
O.k., call me crazy. But the thing I've missed the most with the move towards "desktop environments" like this is the loss of the ability to write to the root window.
"Why?" you ask? Call me silly. But I've loved that little xsnow program for ages. Every winter I put it on and it relaxes me so much.
It's a pity that it doesn't work (or works poorly) with all these new fangled things. I know that you can get it to work somewhat in KDE, but the icons get scratched off with each snowflake.
Can it be that hard to layer the drawing sequences in the root manager?
Sorry - small hang-up here.
I think you've confused "easy to use" with "dumbed down". Contrary to popular belief, the two are not the same thing. Your washing machine example proves it. By your own admission, older less functional washing machines were difficult to use and had complex interfaces. Modern washing machines do more, but they're easier to use. Would you prefer a thirty year old washing machine because it had a more complex interface?
Another great example is VCRs. I used to have an old Panasonic with complex push-button controls for setting scheduled recordings. Heck, even setting the clock was a chore. Nowadays, a Tivo does everything that my old Panasonic did (and more!) but it does it with an easy-to-use OSD. Is the old VCR more powerful because it was harder to use? I think not.
This
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.