To me, it is one of the best way of examining at a glance a very structured file system. It also allows you to move files between several levels, without cut/paste or opening a second window in the destination folder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ColumnBrowseInOSX10.2.8.jpg
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger/Using_the_Finder#Column_View

I’ve submitted an idea for this on ubuntu brainstorm:

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/4496/

I would love a group view as well. I’d humbly pledge what little I have in my paypal account to see that feature come about. It’s inclusion in Dolphin is probably the sole reason that KDE4 looks tempting to me.

The point of column view is to see a great deal of files at once by taking a basic listview, removing the details columns (which in many situations are useless) then populating those columns with data that’s useful thereby maximizing the amount of relevant information within a given space.

In a 10 item x 3 column setup the user can view a continuous list of 30 items. They key word here being ‘continuous’ list. Your method may still displays 30 items at one time but it only displays 10 relevant items at one time. Say for example I have a folder of 70 files and I’m looking for a particular XML file (out of 22 XML files). I would naturally sort by file extension then scroll to the point where the XML files start. With a horizontal arrangement I could see every XML file at the same time (or pretty close to it). With a vertical arrangement I would have exactly zero benefit over simply using a list view.

Anyway to integrate that feature into regular details?

I appreciate that this is an important ‘familiarity’ item for GNOME users coming from a Windows background, and that it fills a niche that neither of Nautilus’ existing views fill (a space-efficient view of lots of files), but it seems that in copying Windows Explorer’s behaviour you’ve also copied its two most infuriating attributes:

1. When the list overflows, it scrolls horizontally. Horizontal scrolling is uncomfortable and awkward, it clashes with all the usual navigation shortcuts (the scroll wheel scrolls vertically, not horizontally! We have Page Up and Page Down, not Page Left and Page Right!), and it’s just generally One More Strange Thing to learn to deal with. If you followed the example of ls, and fit as many columns as possible horizontally then overflowed vertically, it’d be a lot easier to deal with.

1. Every column is given the exact same spacing. This is particularly frustrating in Windows, where the file dialogs are rather small, but if you have a file with an unusually long filename then it’s not hard to wind up with a file-list with a single column of short-named files clustered against the left-hand edge, and vast emptiness to the right. You’d see the second and subsequent columns if you scrolled right, but the only clue that there are some hidden items is that the scroll-bar-thumb is shorter than it should be (and again, most people don’t look at the horizontal scrollbar because most widgets overflow vertically). If you sized each column to fit the file-names in that column, much grief could be avoided.

Thanks a lot!

This is solving this also:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/76/