Manny: you should totally blog this, I’ve been waiting for this kind of view for a long time
OK, official announcement: Yesterday I merged the “Compact View” into Nautilus trunk (which will become Nautilus 2.24). You may have read my blog entry about the view back in February.
It mostly works like the column-wise view of Windows Explorer, but it has more bugs. For instance, under some mysterious conditions the window sometimes constantly re-calculates its size. This bug could be observed very seldom with the “Icon View”, which uses the same infrastructure.
Oh, and it has a preference for toggling whether the column width is determined separately for each column. Otherwise, we use the same width for all columns displayed in a view. We probably still need some fine-tuning for satisfying at least 95% of the users, but it is a good start.
Obligatory screenshot, with variable column width:
Oh, and we are working like mad to fix the regressions due to the GVFS migration. However, hail to GVFS and Alex Larsson. GVFS is just cute. You should all fanboy GVFS! And of course use it in your applications… .
In simliar news, we really need more manpower at Nautilus and GVFS. Cosimo Cechi, A. Walton and Paolo Borelli (Nautilus), and Christian Kellner and Benjamin Otte (GVFS) all do a great development job, but as all big projects there are so many tiny glitches and issues, you just have to help us.
As a start, compile a list of 3-5 (Nautilus or GNOME) issues that are totally cumbersome and fix them, or help us to fix them! 🙂
THANK YOU!!!
Finally! Cool!
I wish this were a simple fix:
Network operations happen in the same thread as all my Nautilus windows use, causing them to block and become unresponsive while waiting on a remote FTP server to get back to me.
Splitting things out into other threads is never fun though 🙁
Finally!
Could we have a “Compacter View” where the vertical spacing between the icons isn’t as big?
Perfecto! I just love all GVFS work of Nautilus! I am looking forward to seeing a faster, more stable and more robust file manager. Keep up the good work, I don’t know much about coding so I will try my best to help fix non-coding related bugs.
Thanks heaps 🙂
Matt:
> Network operations happen in the same thread as all my Nautilus
> windows use, causing them to block and become unresponsive
> while waiting on a remote FTP server to get back to me.
No, they are executed in other threads, you should not notice any freezes.
Mårten:
> Could we have a “Compacter View”
> where the vertical spacing between
> the icons isn’t as big?
I just modified the behavior. You will see half the vertical space between icons (compared to the screenshot), and we will not request padding space below each column.
Thank you after 10 years delay for such feature.
YES!!!
Now, if that were paired with a preference to NOT remember each folder’s view settings – just like on Windows – then Nautilus would become, to me, without fault.
That and it’s a bit odd that the view selector is on the address lane, and not the toolbar, but hey, it works.
And I did try to do those things myself, but my C is so-so, and GTK+ code is… daunting?
So is it possible to get an Ubuntu Hardy .deb with this working?
I’m not looking forward to not having this feature for the coming 6 months…
> So is it possible to get an Ubuntu Hardy .deb with this working?
> I’m not looking forward to not having this feature for the coming 6 months…
You just have to find somebody who ports back a few trunk patch sets. However, there is still a bug that has been around for ages which sometimes locks up the icon container when resizing in a specific manner. It just seems to affect text-besides-icon, so it wasn’t really noticed before.
Christian, thanks a thousand times for added the compact view to Nautilus. I’ve also wanted this for years. You rock.