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GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

jayfax.neocities.org

451–460 of 756 posts

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#451
post #436

You will find lots of such examples of a feature which you personally find very important and wonder why such a simple thing is not supported yet. I guess everyone has such examples. And you will also find such examples for MacOSX or Windows. For me personally, I wonder why mouse wheel/scroll acceleration is still not implemented. I implemented it a while ago for Xorg, which is outdated now, and also the maintainer w…

There's a quote that I think of in situations like this: "Be the change you want to see in the world" - ghandi That said, you can't do that with windows or macosx. Now capitalism works, so apple and microsoft apply the money they make to hard/unsexy things like sleep-wake bug fixes and APIs and sane defaults. But they also bake advertising into their codebase and leech data home to the mothership and prevent you from…

That said, you can't do that with windows or macosx.

I'm not as sure with Macs (and the surrounding culture isn't really eager on such things anyway), but there's a long history of people modding Windows in various ways, that goes back to the DOS days. Of course your customisation is highly unlikely to make it back to MS, but things like WindowBlinds were extremely popular.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#452
post #29

This has somehow gotten worse in recent years. When saving, it used to be you could use the mouse to navigate to a directory, then type the desired filename, and press enter. Now, typing the filename initiates a contextual search within the current directory. Clicking in the filename textbox and starting to type doesn’t work either. You have to highlight the base (not the extension or “.”) of the filename. At that po…

Instead of fixing old problems that the entire community agrees with wild consensus, they insist on spending time creating new problems.

Perhaps we should stop whining and start fixing them. And then if the developers refuse to accept things people have been wanting for well over a decade then we can fork it and simply abandon them like any other archaic unusable thing of the past. We've all asked very politely long enough.

This is open source, we don't have to put up with this, that's the whole idea behind it. Closed source solutions from 23 years ago shouldn't still be running circles around the current stuff. We should all be embarrassed.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#453

Reminds me of a different story involving Bill Gates, toilets, and user interface design: https://web.archive.org/web/20120427101911/http://jacksonfis... "At one particularly frustrating moment, I offered the following: “Bill, a shower, a toilet, and a water fountain all have mechanisms to control water flow, places where the water comes out, some sort of porcelain basin to hold the water, and a drain, but we don’t c…

Funny you'd post that in here because MacOS sucks at this and Windows does a great job. In fact arguably the engineering mind worked great there. The file open dialog in Windows is just a repurposed Windows Explorer view which means you can access all the things you can from explorer when opening and saving including things like unzipping a zip file, renaming some existing file that's in the way (like file.txt -> fil…

i run into this a lot and always think in my head how much easier this is in windows

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse is when you know the exact file name that you want to open, and the interface fights against you writing it! For example I want to open /tmp/a.png, but there's thousands of files on /tmp and the cursor disappears while "loading" them, and and some characters of the file name are lost, or typed on different parts of the interface.

Recursive search instead of type-ahead search within one directory in the file picker is criminally terrible. I don't think there is any implementation of a file picker that behaves like this (other than Gtk's).

I have found a (cumbersome) solution to this using Xfce. Its Thunar file manager does implement type-ahead, so whenever I need to open a file that is saved in some deeply-nested folder, I open Thunar (using a custom shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+E) and quickly navigate to the file using type-ahead and press Ctr+L to copy its full path to the clipboard, then I switch to my app and paste the address.

For complex paths, I found that this is the quickest way to open the file I want.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#455
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recursive search instead of type-ahead search within one directory in the file picker is criminally terrible. I don't think there is any implementation of a file picker that behaves like this (other than Gtk's).

Yup - one of the many reasons I needed to stay on MATE.

It has been a long time since I tried MATE. Do you mean that the file dialog does not implement recursive search?

If it is so, then I must consider switching! (At the moment I am using Xfce.)

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#456
This is a consequence of the unfortunate intersection between C++ and Javascript.

UI design is an iterative affair and compile debug cycles just never seem to end. It is why you get all this meaningless requests to remove this tiny feature or that tiny feature. Apparently every little thing affects compile times and you have all these so called "developers" trying to gain attention or make some name for themselves by proposing insignificant things all the time.

As for Javascript UIs - well they are all built on C++.

If you can't get the C++ right, how can you get Javascript that depends on it right.

Says Joe Amstrong - "I think the only computer languages one needs are C and Erlang, don't you think so?

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#457

Sometimes I wonder if I should just quit starting my own side projects and instead take one open-source project and just work to improve the quality. No new and shiny stuff, but boring bread and butter business. For example, I like XMPP, but many clients seem to have quality issues. So I could start writing tests for them and therefore find and fix bugs?

Actually if you're serious about this, ping me at the address in my profile (XMPP/email). Even if just to chat :)

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some folks use this fact to place ads in such way that when you want to click something by the time your finger taps the screen there is an ad underneath. So annoying.

This is the worst, a french website Leboncoin (craigslist basically) does this, makes me want to murder the people behind it When you click next page nothing happens long enough to make you think your click hasn't been registered, then right as you click again the page loads with ads right where the button was

You should use an adblocker.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#459
The author thinks that anyone using a file picker with no preview thumbnails is doing it wrong. I think that anyone using a file picker is doing it wrong.

I frequently open files in projects that have tens of thousands of files scattered across thousands of directories. Any process for opening a file that involved navigating that directory hierarchy by clicking with a mouse would waste an enormous amount of time.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#460

> One might also say "Just use KDE!" Yeah, I guess I could use KDE, just like I use the downstairs toilet instead of the other ones. Yeah but when you go to the downstairs toilet you can't bring in your favourite newspaper because the paper its printed on isn't compatible with the light bulb and you can't read it. Firefox on KDE uses the GTK filepicker. No thumbnails.

This is one of the reasons why I wish Falkon had more active development. Having a fully KDE native browser is so nice.
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