Project Exposé: Improving the GTK+ tree view selection interaction

After my recent blog entry about Nautilus tab support, Jared Moore raised his hand, started a private bzr branch and hacked away. This is great news, because it shows that we have so much contribution potential. For instance, Paweł Paprota is about to receive an SVN account.

A main focus of us (the “established” developers and maintainers) is to ensure that all you programming contributors out there receive optimal assistance and mentoring. Of course, this also applies to users, translators, artwork contributors, and journalists!

Because my last blog entry was a success, let’s try it again:

We are looking for someone who wants to improve the GTK+ tree view selection interaction: At the moment there is no way to pop up a context menu or drag a selection rectangle in a crowded list of files in the Nautilus list view.

The six years old bug report is available here, an email explaining the current issue is available on the mailing list archives of gtk-devel-list.

4 thoughts on “Project Exposé: Improving the GTK+ tree view selection interaction”

  1. About to receive? Pavel received his account yesterday at 22:46 CEST. It was working at 23:00 CEST. The process is still far from perfect (see the reply on foundation-list + that you weren’t set as maintainer), but at least in this case it was completed before you blogged 😉

  2. I just commented on the bug with a pointer to the corresponding Suse bug. David Liang’s patch solves this very nicely for Nautilus.

    GtkTreeView could very well have the same behavior by default. Decoupling right-click from changing the selection makes it much easier to use, and lets you use “empty area” menus even in crowded views.

    Nautilus could also add a header to the popup menu, saying “N selected files”, or “Commands for $folder_name”, to make it even more clear what’s going on.

  3. How hard would it be to make a Terminator out of Nautilus? That is, allow the view to be split (and separately navigated as well as dragged between them)? That would be one helluva killer feature and address all the commander-style wishes in a great way. Do Nautilus have any way to “embed” like the VTE terminal has?

  4. i haven’t tested the mentioned patch, but to me it always felt weird, when right clicking didn’t select the row i clicked. not sure if i’ll like it or file a bug report right away 😉
    i think a behaviour similar to apple’s finder would be better, where there is a difference between being able to drag a file when you click the actual chars of the file name in the first column, or being able to not drag but use the rubberbanding to multi-select on drag when clicked on any other column or possible white space in the “name” column. this could also be used for right click, as microsoft’s explorer does, i believe: right click on the file name changes the row and selects the file, right clicking any other text or white space in that row opens the current directory’s context menu.

    this way would also provide a rubberbanding possibility in the treeview, which is also still missing and that sucks.

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