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."

Comments

Fileselectors are obsolete!

[Florian]

File selector boxes are a legacy of the early MacOS until version 6.x, which was single-tasking and didn't allow to switch between several applications running parallel. In fact, a file selector box is nothing but a miniature replica of a graphical file manager (like the MacOS finder, the Windows Explorer, konqueror, nautilus, rox etc.). The more "functional" file selectors got, the more bloated and redundant vis-a-vis the file manager they became.

It would make more sense IMHO to abolish file selectors altogether and instead throw users into their preferred file manager for opening files. All it would need is a freedesktop.org standard protocol for file manager/application interaction and perhaps a $FILEMANAGER environment variable. (Theoretically, $FILEMANAGER could then also be a shell in a terminal.)

-F