Recently I stumbled upon mccann's blog entry[1] "Cross Cut" where he described several changes soon to hit nautilus. I was happy to see that most seem to be very well considered. I especially welcome the incorporation of a functional search capability.
That being said, I was a bit disturbed by the removal of type-ahead find. While I can understand that there are a few issues with the existing implementation, I think we have to be careful not to lose sight of the fact that there are at least two common distinct uses of nautilus: searching and browsing. In the case of the former, the user has a specific file or group of files in mind. In this case, nautilus should allow the user to locate, isolate, and manipulate these items quickly. Clearly, a solid search feature goes a long way towards accomplishing this goal. In the case of "browsing", however, the user seeks to quickly survey a group of files quickly. Among other things, it necessary to allow the user to efficiently move among the contents of a directory. Working in experimental physics, I find myself frequently needing to wade through large directories of data sets. While doing so, I generally want to quickly move between regions of the parameter space (encoded in the file name). For this, type-ahead find is nearly ideal, allowing me to move to a region of files while allowing me to easily survey surrounding files. For this reason, to remove the type-ahead find facility without providing a replacement (hopefully superior) mechanism to fill the need for easy movement while browsing would be a significant regression in functionality. I'll have to think a bit about what such a mechanism would look like, but this is something that should be seriously considered before moving forward with removal of the existing solution. Cheers, - Ben [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2012/08/01/cross-cut/ -- nautilus-list mailing list nautilus-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list