Earlier quoted context omitted.
> personal preferences instead of work around technical weaknesses These are the same thing. Your personal preference is my technical weakness. Everybody has different requirements. The scrollbar is a great example: There might be a use-case for the (absolutely abysmal IMO) disappearing scrollbar pattern gnome wants to push on people. Maybe it's screen real estate. Having a scrollbar on a tiny screen could be argued…
> Then it's not "exactly like" what I would do at all - you'd take your hand off your keyboard and switch to your mouse to use a graphical file manager tool. Definitely yes. That's what I'd definitely do. But there is no inherent reason for that. It just feels superior to me. Why should graphical applications be fundamentally worse (e.g. in terms of keyboard support) than terminal applications when terminal emulators…
> Why should graphical applications be fundamentally worse (e.g. in terms of keyboard support) than terminal applications when terminal emulators are a graphical application?
> Yes. All these 800ms!
For you. This one time that you tested. It took almost an entire second. Or, another way you could say that would be "longer than it takes terminology to pop up a preview".
> Yeah, well, technically, of course. It just never felt like "waiting". It's a matter of milliseconds
Well then either dolphin is by some miracle orders of magnitude faster than any file browser I have ever seen (which includes earlier versions of dolphin that presumably have fewer features than the current one), or you're not viewing folders containing many files. Or maybe you just have the fastest and most powerful computer ever built. Or perhaps you just don't have any expectation of a performant UI and consider twiddling your thumbs to be no big deal.
> terminal applications don't need to enumerate directories when they deal with it? How does that work?
They do need to enumerate files, obviously, but they don't need to - for each and every file and subdirectory:
1. determine the mimetype for the tile, which may involve actually opening and reading the file
2. look up that mimetype in their "mime type -> friendly description" table
3. look up the default application that needs to be opened if you double-click on said file based on that mimetype
4. if the mimetype is "video" or "image", look in their cache for a thumbnail for the file, and if that doesn't exist fire up a thumbnailer to generate one, which likely involves opening and reading in the entire file.
6. load the aforementioned thumbnail into memory and display it in the appropriate place
7. as previously mentioned, enumerate and count the number of items in directories
8. I'm sure a bunch of other similar things that I can't even be bothered trying to remember right now.
> Even if you just press "tab" in your shell, it will probably do exactly that, no?
> I really don't see why terminal applications should be fundamentally faster than graphical applications in that regard
Seems to me like maybe you've never used a terminal program? Or perhaps you've never used a gui program? I'm not sure what to say to this. I don't think I've ever seen a piece of GUI software which comes close to the speed of its terminal-based equivalent. I'll grant you there are outliers, but those are rare and every single example I can think of doesn't use a GUI toolkit.
There are a few factors at play here. One big one (maybe the biggest?) is simply the complexity of the interface: Terminal emulators are built and optimised to display a whole bunch of text very quickly. They have one job: display text. GUIs and GUI toolkits, on the other hand, are huge complex libraries with a large number of different controls that they need to draw in the right place, do layout, have to deal with mouse interaction and event systems and the windowing system, deal with weird input methods and accessibility, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. They're orders of magnitude more complex just in their interfaces. And that's before you start doing things like loading icons for every little button you're displaying and thumbnailing every media file in a directory so that you can load it as a pretty icon in your file manager. And before you start taking into account that a lot of gui software is just poorly written trash seemingly written by morons under the CADT model (Hi, gnome!).
GUIs are fine, and the best option for a bunch of things. But they're much MUCH less efficient than terminal-based programs.
I don't know what else to say. Go talk to every single GUI application author ever, I guess?
> your terminal emulator is a graphical application, right?
> If you know the file name starts with "cat_s", then you can also find it this way in Dolphin.
Meanwhile, like I said, I'll already be half way through previewing the video, and my workflow won't involve switching to some worse program.
> There are corner cases where I really search in a trickier, more dynamic way. Maybe with "find". Or five lines of Python scripting. But not hundred times a day. Definitely it's not worth rewriting every application now as a terminal app (that tries to be a graphical app via niche-in-niche technologies).
> Yes, that's one of the things that I feel so spooky with that approach.
> It cannot work...
> Maybe for a handful of persons that constantly search for jpeg/png/mpeg files, in bulk mode, and need quick previews.
And it's a better experience in literally every way imaginable than firing up fucking dolphin and waiting for three ice ages and also an image/video viewer.
