I’m not saying that file chooser is bad at all for selecting files, but there are two features I would definitely love in it:
- Being able to get the size of the file.
- Thumbnailing support
Size of the file
The use case I found where I need this is “adding attachments in evolution”. If I want to send a mail, I usually want to avoid sending very big files as this is not very good for most mail accounts people use.
If I want to do this with Evolution/Gnome, I have to open the folder with Nautilus to check the size of the files.
In fact, you can find other interesting information you’ll want to check when you are opening a file with file chooser. For example, the id3 tags of a mp3/ogg file.
I suppose the UI design experts can point good ideas about this. For me it would be enough if the contextual menu of a file would offer a “Properties” action.
Thumbnailing
We don’t need thumbnailing only for opening a file from gimp or to attach an image. The thumbnail of a image works better than the file name to describe the contents of a file, so we should enable the user to use it to know which file he’s managing, even when the application is not a imaging related one.
So I suppose it should enable thumbnails by default.
And a last very easy to implement idea
Just provide a way to open in nautilus a folder you’re viewing in file chooser. Not sure how, as a “open folder” button would lead to confussion. Maybe “browse here”? This way you could easily access to all the operations available in nautilus for files and folder, without having to browse to a folder two times (one in file chooser and one in nautilus).
It would be nice if these file-chooser dialogs would handle large directories smarter /faster.
As a person that likes the way UNIX/Linux works I generally dont like a “save-dialog” to take ages just because I have:
$ ls -la | wc -l
1586
in the home-catalog. The save-dialog shouldn’t require a complete read of the catalog. The load-dialog should not either if the user actuall remembers the filename. Just ordinary completion would be sufficient.
jesper, I agree with you on this. I’m not saying we should add a column for size, or strange calculations (apart from thumbnailing, one thing that can be filled after loading the dialog without problems). I don’t want file chooser to take ages to load the files when you just want it to be really fast.
I suggest that we should have a properties action or popup in the files, that shows this kind of detailed information.
And thumbnail should be added asynchronously, and this way not disturbing the “fast” use case of simply going to open a file you already know the name.
Adding any kind of information to that dialog should not increase its load time. Information such as the size may be displayed asynchronously thanks to GTK idle functions just as anything else, e.g., thumbnails.