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Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

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Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#91

Post by senko »

continuational wrote: post #64
cycomanic wrote: post #35

> It's worth mentioning that I agree that the modern design paradigm probably is friendly to beginner users in many ways. But at some point, people stop being beginners. People who use computers several hours per day, performing a wide variety of tasks in many different programs, should also be taken in to account when designing software. As such, my critique comes from the point of what's usually called a "power use…

> The same people often complain that terminals break with "standard shortcuts" because they can't copy with ctrl-C... It does break with standard shortcuts. And worse, there's absolutely no consistency between terminal applications on which shortcuts to use. It's a mess, and complaints are warrented.

Ctrl-C sending a SIGINT to the program running in the terminal is the standard shortcut. Woe to the terminal arrogant enough to assume their precious copy/paste is more important.

Now, Super-C vs Ctrl-Shift-C (across the UI), we can argue about.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#92

Post by cocoto »

Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #66
jiehong wrote: post #65

This reminds me of not being able to right click in Files in list view for creating a new document or pasting something, because it only accepts a right click in an empty area. Yet, in list view, as soon as you have a few files and the window is full, you’re given no empty area to click in. I saw some people have the same issue [0] in the past, and it’s not really been fixed either [1]. [0]: https://ubuntuforums.org/…

I often try to open a new Terminal window in my current folder like that. Which often is impossible for the same reason. So I navigate up, until I find a folder that is not full, open the Terminal there, and ‚cd‘ down to the folder i wanted…

You can click on the three dot menu at the right of the path, there is an option to open a terminal. You can also switch to icon view and right-click between icons to open a terminal. You can also go to parent folder, right click the folder you were before and open it in a terminal. Many workarounds but I agree it’s not really good UI.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#93

Post by grokys »

webkike wrote: post #20
jrm4 wrote: post #17

Glad to see someone go deep on this in a way that I've felt while using it but was unable to fully articulate why it's so bad. Again, I'll keep saying it, I'm not the biggest Apple fan in the world, but however many Gnome devs in a trenchcoat will never equal a Steve Jobs and it's weird, borderline pathetic, for them to keep trying -- when all they end up doing is changing things for the sake of changing them.

I have actually had more problems with the Mac OS finder then I have the gnome one, and all of my problems stem from answering the question “how do I go up a directory from where I am?” Never bothered to figure out the actual right way. Might be easy. But hard to figure out

It's also impossible for a new user of macOS to show hidden files without an online search. Iirc it's a non documented (in the UI) keyboard shortcut. Very discoverable.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#94

Post by tveyben »

hedora wrote: post #38
comex wrote: post #9

Decent critique, but it mixes together two things: the design language, and UI papercuts showing a lack of attention to detail. Consider the current macOS Finder: https://a.qoid.us/20240907-finder.png Finder's design is extremely similar to GNOME Files! And so the inherent downsides of the design language are present in Finder too, such as it being harder to drag windows around or click to activate windows. But macOS…

The current version of Finder is a massive regression from what it used to be. If you don’t believe me, fire up https://macos9.app on a machine with a mouse, and try organizing / browsing some files.

Oh - the Good old MacOS days (pree y2k) - agree the Finder from MacOS 9 was really pleasant to use.

These days I’m in love with Total Commander (yes I mainly use Win+WSL2), but I know of several TC style File Managers are available for the Macintosh)

And i do know that TC was cloned/inspirere from ’mc’ (to give credit…!)

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#95

Post by tveyben »

butz wrote: post #53

Oh GNOME, hiding "Power off" option under additional submenu, that user wouldn't accidentally click it, and then putting "Format" right next to "Safely remove drive" in Files.

Same kind of thing exists on Windows - for eg USB mass storage devices, ‘Eject’ and ‘Format’ are listes next to each other in the menu… One is harmless - the other potentially destructive

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#96

Post by kaanyalova »

hedora wrote: post #40

Have they fixed the save dialog box yet? If I type -s filename , then I expect the current file to be saved with filename (perhaps with an extension appended). The gtk-2 behavior was to start searching the list of files/directories when you type filename, then select whatever is highlighted when you press enter. Anyway, I’m not going to install gnome to find out. It’s not surprising the file browser is as bad as desc…

It still seems to search for files/directories when entering the file name but it doesn't select the first file, it saves with the filename you entered. So it was fixed.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#97

Post by kaanyalova »

ddtaylor wrote: post #37
PeakKS wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The writer is just using an old version, you can just click the bar to enter edit mode.

For context "old" here is within the last 6 months.

The Gnome version that the writer uses is Gnome 43 which was released 2 years ago.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#98

Post by stuaxo »

comex wrote: post #9

Decent critique, but it mixes together two things: the design language, and UI papercuts showing a lack of attention to detail. Consider the current macOS Finder: https://a.qoid.us/20240907-finder.png Finder's design is extremely similar to GNOME Files! And so the inherent downsides of the design language are present in Finder too, such as it being harder to drag windows around or click to activate windows. But macOS…

While I agree with the authors critique, I find Macs finder a lot worse to use.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#99

Post by okasaki »

exe34 wrote: post #50
gibbetsandcrows wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part about controls inside the titlebar is things like Firefox and Chromium which implement their own decorations and window design with the tabs ending up in 95% of your draggable titlebar area, so you often end up moving the tab instead of moving the window. I'm not sure who will blink first with the lousy design situation, but the users are paying the price. (Honestly browsers just need to change this...…

i gave up entirely and went with xmonad. normally window placement is automatic and predictable, but if I really want to resize something, it's Super+Right Drag.

This works in GNOME too, it's Super + left mouse.

Super + right mouse anywhere in the window presents a window management menu, including resize/move options

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#100

Post by jampekka »

Just to make clear to the Gnome developers: you've created by far the best desktop DE there is. I hope you don't get discouraged by the constant whining of a minority clamoring for some clunky ad-hoc 90's interfaces whose suckiness is just glossed over with nostalgia and incapability to learn new and more poweful ways of using computers.
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