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The State Of The GTK+ File Selector
Anonymous BillyGoat writes "The next stable release of GTK+ (from the 2.4x series) will have a new file selector, and of recent, a lot of activity has been going on around that. One of the GNOME artmasters, Tigert, has released a mockup of the new file selector and the GTK developers are busy working towards that. Meanwhile the people from OSNews have some other ideas, while an OSNews reader has made even better mockups."
Left-side shortcuts on common file open/save dialog boxes can be easily configurable by using
a) group policy editor
b) tweakui from microsoft.
(both of these assume you are running Windows2000/XP/2003)
In either cases, you have a choice of setting the shortcut to a namespace clsid (my computer, my docs, etc) or to a full pathname to anywhere you want.
For example, my file/open dialog on my windows machine has desktop,mycomputer,2 direct links to company file shares, and a path link to a temp directory on my machine.
But, of course, you couldn't be bothered to know this, since its easier to just complain.
what does sending him/her love have to do with saving my files?
Well, in the case of her if you don't know, then you and your parents missed a very important conversation.
In the case of him it probably doesn't have a whole lot to do with it, even if evidence presented in Jurassic Park is to the contrary.
In all seriousness, I believe it is referring to the maintaner of OSNews. I believe it is a she, and they post quite a few UI mockups on their site, and some constructive discussion usually follows.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Uh except that MS got it from Mac!
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
> But a buddy was showing me some of his favorite GTK themes on his Gnome desktop, and I have to admit that I was impressed. Unfortunately, when I checked to see how many packages I'd have to install for Gnome, there were over 30 -- Mozilla was one of the dependencies!
> So, can any
The eyecandy comes from different places. Applications that use the GTK+ widgets will render with your choice of GTK+ theme, regardles of what window manager you use. The window manager eyecandy will only effect the "decorations" around the windows, though some of them will allow nice customizations for that. The panel and panel applets are provided by GNOME itself.
I use GNOME, but mostly for the panel these days; most of my favorite applications have been cast aside by current GNOME management. However, by using GARNOME I can comment out the builds for crap that I don't want, and almost trivially add back in a cast-aside GTK+ application that I do want.
I use the Sawfish window manager (another cast-aside), customized to look like the old ShinyFusion theme I used to use under Enlightenment, with many virtual desktops to organize my work (I typically stay logged in for six months at a time), and with lots of nifty buttons in the "decorations" to allow things like maximize-vertically, maximize-horizontally, maximize-both, etc.
BTW, you can window shop for eyecandy at themes.org. It is organized according to what component supports a theme (window manager, toolkit, etc.).
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Why not AVFS?
:)
Don't make things browse to network shares. Make networked things look like file systems to the tools available. Same idea, only with less recoding, and as such a smaller point-of-break.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the KDE v3 file selector is the best one I've ever used simply because the shortcuts on the left hand side are easy to use and customize (just give 'em a context click, and you can change the name, location, icon, etc).
And then you add in cool features like the kio_slave support (so that the location can be a WebDav dir for DnD file publishing, etc), and the fact that the custom locations can be made app specific (wow, my digital camera knows about my image dir, but I won't worry about that cluttering my kwrite dialogs!), and you see why KDE is a great DE to use.
The KDE folks got the file dialog right a while back -- it's time more people noticed their great work.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The Cocoa file selector effectively shows a spreadsheet of all the files in all parent folders of the current one. Fast to navigate but IMHO bewildering for a novice user. Also, the favorites are in a pop-up menu that you can't drag folders to.
The Carbon file selector is based on the classic Max OS navigation service; essentially it shows a dialog with a mini-Finder (i.e. file manager). I liked this method; opening a file from an application works the same as opening it from the Finder. I regret Apple didn't continue with this in OS X.
- GTK's poor resize performance compared to Qt.
- GTK's poor expose handling compared to Qt.
- For practical purposes, lack of component technology. Bonobo is there, but almost no apps use it. Meanwhile, tons of KDE apps use KParts.
- For practical purposes, lack of a network-transparent filesystem. gnome-vfs is there, but not many apps use it, and its not supported through the standard file dialog. Meanwhile, every KDE app uses KIO.
- Nothing comparable to DCOP (until D-BUS comes out).
- Lower-level UI framework, compared to KDE's higher-level framework. GNOME's button Ok/Cancel button order is dictated by the HIG, while in KDE, its dictated by the framework, and would take a single line of code in kdelibs to change for all KDE apps.
- Lack of UI integration at the technology level. KDE apps use XML-GUI to define their layout. GUI layout can be change without touching a single line of code. KDE apps support customizable toolbars at the framework level, so all apps get it for free. The HIG is great, and GNOME's UI is very polished compared to KDE, but it would be nice if GNOME did like KDE and enforced a lot of those things in the code framework level.
Let's look at some of the upcoming GTK+ 2.4's features that Qt/KDE already has.
File selector (#29087)
------
KDE has it.
Combo widget (#50554)
------
Qt has it.
New action-based menu API (#55393)
-------
KDE has it.
Toolbar improvements (#55393)
--------
If you click on the feature request number and look at the proposed features, you'll see that Qt/KDE has a lot of these already, like customizable toolbars.
Autocompletion and history for GtkEntry (#69613)
--------
KDE already has this.
XCursor support for GDK. (#69436)
---------
Yep, this too. And they even mention Qt right in the first post of the feature-request thread, how nice!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
KDE has an awesome file selector - as I go down the list of PDF files, and choose one, a preview window shows the PDF scaled, right there in the selection windo
You're confusing GNOME and GTK+.
The discussion is about the GTK+ file selector, which is analogous to the Qt, rather than the KDE file selector.
May we never see th
Hey, its just the GTK+ people that are living in the stone age!
Seriously, though, the file dialog is hardly representative. It was just an oddity in GTK+ that just got put off way longer than it should have. Other parts of the desktop are not like that, and in a lot of respects, they are ahead of Mac/Windows. For example, I can access remote servers transparently, right from the file dialog in KDE. Very handy when you live in a networked environment like a university.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Nothing says "KISS" like a XML file to configure the **** out'a the file selector.
If you want to see real KISS, check out ROX-Desktop. A DnD item with a filename under it, save by dragging it to your filer. Open by draggin the file from the filer to the app. A file manager manages the files, so you don't have a dialog trying to cram all it's functionality into it.
So what does KDE do for a "next-generation save/open box?" Because KDE has had support for this, in the form of KIO, for years. In any KDE file dialog, you can just save a file to "fish://foo" and it works just fine. It supports a ton of protocols, including SMB, bzip2, http, ftp, pop3, smtp, webdav, nntp, etc. Hell, there is even a cool KIO handler for APT, to turn Konqueror into a package manager :)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The point of the new GTK+ file selector is not so much how it looks than the fact that it is based around a new, extensible API. The old implementation was so tied to the API that its appearance couldn't really be altered (on a system-wide level), the new file selector can.
from what I've read somewhere in the wild blue of mailing lists et al, apparently the new file selector class can be extended by developers to include things like preview panes. (Actually, developers for GTK+ 2.2 and earlier can do that with the current file selector too -- you can see an example in GIMP 1.3.)
The GTK+ developers are taking care to include as many good features as possible, and then develop a framework that allows easy extension. It's not apparent from this example, but the checkbox to send love to Eugenia is supposed to be an example of this extensibility.
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
Ever try following a shortcut to a directory in a dialog box? This only recently worked the way you expect it
It's worked since Windows 2000, which was almost 4 years ago and hardly "recently".
It did take them far too long to fix that very obvious bug, however.
Yes, there is. The CURRENT GTK+ selector does this, you just press TAB to autocomplete and change to that directory, no need to press enter.
dare to compare this screenshot of the panther selector to the gtk+ one.
very similar - with the exception that the mac seperates devices and directories with a horizontal line. probably a good idea.
2 1337 4 u!
The love-sending widget will not be present in the final release of the new file selector, and is included in mockups to demonstrate how developers can add in special-purpose widgets into the window. For example, The GIMP may insert a quality slider in that place for saving JPEG images.
Early mockups used the phrase " Frobnicate the file ," which was changed to " Lart whoever asks about this button " after countless questions as to the use of frobnicating files.
These screenshots are linked from Federico Mena-Quintero's Activity Log, which is really rather fun to read. You may also be interested in Planet Gnome, which aggregates the weblogs of many interesting Gnome and Open Source personalities.
Not quite, that's just a normal Finder window.
A file open dialog is one of these (displaying list view: the 4th widget from the left will toggle it into column view).
Rox has something like that, the whole filemanagment is basically based on drag&drop, to load a file you drag it on the application, to save it, you drag an icon given by the application to your filemanager. Its pretty neat, but to make this one really work well all apps would need to follow that paradigma and looking at the whole mix of software out there I don't think that will happen in the near future, which is kind of a shame.
kill -9? Try taskkill /F /PID [pid] sometime. And if you don't know your WinXP processes by PID, try tasklist for a list of 'em. Oh, right... this is only in XP Pro. Remember that, in case you're running XP Home -- you have to get third party tools for the "little" Windows.
Actually, there is *some* power in the Windows commandline, it's just poorly documented, and more poorly understood. Too bad it's still missing grep, sed, and awk (though there is "find" for some grep-like tasks).
Just my $0.02.
-Josh O-
Type the directory name (or part of it) and press tab... sure it's not the same, but it does the same thing, try it... you might like it.
I just discovered this the other day...
...
The registry key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WaitToKillAppTimeout
(And if it isn't that one, just search the registry for 'WaitToKillAppTimeout')
is defaulted at I think 5000ms. Changing this to 0 gives you back that "shot to the head" effect.
Also, others have mentioned the desire for lsof or other such things...
go checkout SysInternals. They have tons of freeware monitor file handles , processes, threades, memory, DLL Accesses, port accesses, disk accesses,
no comment
From Jargon File (4.3.0, 30 APR 2001) : frobnicate /frob'ni-kayt/ vt. [Poss. derived from frobnitz, and usually abbreviated to frob, but `frobnicate' is recognized as the official full form.] To manipulate or adjust, to tweak. One frequently frobs bits or other 2-state devices. Thus: "Please frob the light switch" (that is, flip it), but also "Stop frobbing that clasp; you'll break it". One also sees the construction `to frob a frob'. See tweak and twiddle.
Usage: frob, twiddle, and tweak sometimes connote points along a continuum. `Frob' connotes aimless manipulation; `twiddle' connotes gross manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; `tweak' connotes fine-tuning. If someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting it, he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the screen, he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it. The variant frobnosticate' has been recently reported.
GM/Vauxhall/Opel are touting headlights that swivel as you turn corners as a great new thing, but that's just playing catch-up to Citroen who had those on the DS nearly 40 years ago.
Don't forget the "Tucker" by Preston Tucker in 1948(?)