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

jayfax.neocities.org

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

#571

Post by wodenokoto »

gfxgirl wrote: post #385
seltzered_ wrote: post #56

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…

> Conversely on MacOS if you need to do any of those things your only option is to use Finder which really sucks because you then have navigate to wherever you were in the app

While I don't disagree that it would be nice to be able to do more of the same things in file picker as in finder, there is the possibility to right-click -> open in Finder

Filepicker also supposrt Finders "go to" (cmd+shift+g) that let's you type paths, with autocomplete and support for ~, which is a super nice feature.

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

#572

Post by juskrey »

snvzz wrote: post #27

There's more serious reasons this file picker is broken. Here's a trivial to reproduce and obvious issue that's been there for several years now: 1. Open a directory that loads slowly (e.g. one with thousands of files on a smb3 mount) 2. While the list is loading, select a file (but do not open it) 3. Wait for the whole list to load Once the list finishes loading, the file on the very top of the list gets automatical…

On nearly every OS I know (now I am on MacOS):

1. System boots up and starts some apps which are creating windows. This may take some time.

2. While all of that loading, I am seeing some of the apps of no use, I am quickly switching to one, capturing focus, and pressing the quit shortcut.

3. Between my reaction and actual button press, some other app loads, and focus is switched to its window.

4. My keypress goes into another focused window, which gets closed instead of original one. Tada.

Why OS focus has a priority over user focus?

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

#573

Post by mattowen_uk »

wincy wrote: post #527
jffhn wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the time (10 years ago?) where you could go to google webpage and start typing your search immediately. Then one day I got my typing deleted once the page finished loading. I thought Google would quickly fix this, but soon realized that this kind of annoying asynchronous behavior was becoming a new normal for a lot of GUIs. I have a rule in my GUIs to only show up something when it’s consistent and usable:…

This has started happening to me constantly in Amazon! I start searching for something, make a typo, go back, then somehow it snaps back to the typo before I hit enter and I get bad results. Super annoying, I don’t remember it being a thing before a year or so ago.

The ebay search button has been like this for ages. To the extent, that sometimes, you correct your search query, hit enter to search and it resets back to the previous search query and re-searches that!

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

#574

Post by lloydatkinson »

> This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted. It’s little things like this that add up.

> It stands though that KDE seemed to have this feature working for ages, and they’re doing it for free too. Also, operating systems from the olden times also had it too—Windows 98, as you see at the top of this HTML document.

I'm sure this will upset NN but it is 100% the truth.

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

#575

Post by j1elo »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #427
young_unixer wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find KDE to be pretty ugly. For instance, margins and paddings seem to be all over the place [1]. At least Gnome gets that part right. [1] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Notifications

"This page assumes the status quo as of Plasma 5.7". Plasma is now on version 5.20 so the page you linked has some pretty old examples. The KDE folks are working pretty diligently to clean stuff like this up as they find it. Nate Graham's weekly blog documents this and other updates to the project. https://pointieststick.com/ I personally like KDE and it's Breeze Dark theme a lot.

Small half-joke: Only two words into the front page post I already hit a UX issue! (and a UI inconsistency)

> This week (KWin’s compositing code was almost totally rewritten...)

I then instinctively went on to the top of the article to check on the date, to get an idea of when was "this week" for the author... but there is no date. Oh, well :-)

Opening the post itself (instead of reading from the main page) does indeed change the UI and it now happens to show the date.

Loved the irony...

This all shows that even for people dedicated to it, getting UI/UX right is hard.

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

#576

Post by pizza234 »

ziotom78 wrote: post #455
dm319 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

MATE's based on GTK, so it inherits all the GTK "features", last but not least, the v3 file chooser, which lost along the way the create new folder key binding, and the quick search by prefix (which now has to be inconveniently performed on the address bar).

Additionally, programs may rely on different GTK versions, which also makes things confusing. For example, Visual Studio Code and Firefox use GTK3.

edit: extended with programs explanation

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

#577

Post by kuroguro »

I've always hated the thumbnail view. Always turned it off on all windows machines - it might be just me but it's harder to find what I'm looking for 80% of the time.

What's worse is that windows seems to find some sneaky way to turn it back on for some folders. Have multiple registry tweaks to show every folder in "details" mode that I have to run every couple of months for some reason to keep it that way!

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

#578

Post by ziotom78 »

pizza234 wrote: post #576
ziotom78 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

MATE's based on GTK, so it inherits all the GTK "features", last but not least, the v3 file chooser, which lost along the way the create new folder key binding, and the quick search by prefix (which now has to be inconveniently performed on the address bar). Additionally, programs may rely on different GTK versions, which also makes things confusing. For example, Visual Studio Code and Firefox use GTK3. edit: extende…

Sigh, I feared this answer! :-(

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

#579

Post by steerablesafe »

enriquto wrote: post #76
snvzz wrote: post #27

There's more serious reasons this file picker is broken. Here's a trivial to reproduce and obvious issue that's been there for several years now: 1. Open a directory that loads slowly (e.g. one with thousands of files on a smb3 mount) 2. While the list is loading, select a file (but do not open it) 3. Wait for the whole list to load Once the list finishes loading, the file on the very top of the list gets automatical…

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.

Type ctrl+L first. Don't you love how discoverable these UI tricks are?

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

#580

Post by andybak »

kuroguro wrote: post #577

I've always hated the thumbnail view. Always turned it off on all windows machines - it might be just me but it's harder to find what I'm looking for 80% of the time. What's worse is that windows seems to find some sneaky way to turn it back on for some folders. Have multiple registry tweaks to show every folder in "details" mode that I have to run every couple of months for some reason to keep it that way!

I agree most of the time - aside from when I need to choose an image in a directory of (poorly named) images. Surely this is the situation where you do need thumbnail view? Does this never happen to you?
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