User interface - Suggestion 20050320

This is a suggestion for the user interface based on the current discussion (until 20050320). The user interface discussion so far, brought up two important points:

1. The GtkFileChooser-like path bar seems to be the best way to display the current path to the user and to easily navigate through your file system.
2. It’s necessary to be able to enter a path to open; some people seem to be addicted to a browser like location bar here, while other’s will happily use a simple Open Location dialog.

Based on these results and the fact that Thunar should be easy to use, but still provide some means of flexibility to make it attractive for power users, we’ve modified the UI prototype to fit these requirements. I currently suggest 4 different layouts for the user interface (more are possible, but not useful to demonstrate here).

These are just my suggestions, based on the current discussion. There’s no decision yet (tho, the path button bar as primary interface seems to be mostly decided on). Anyways, you can join the discussion if you think, we’ve missed an important point. All discussion takes place on the thunar-dev mailinglist.

This is about the best interface (in terms of simplicity, ease of use and clean look) we’ve developed so far. It will most probably become the default user interface of Thunar.

This is very similar to the classical browser like file manager, as known from other desktops and other operating systems. Quite a lot of people are addicted to this way of browsing their file system (even quite a lot of Xfce users), so we should support it in Thunar, not as default, but as alternative user interface.

Since the a large part of the current Xfce community uses ROX (for whatever reasons), Thunar should provide a common interface for people that switch from ROX, to help them getting used to Thunar, until they’ll possibly switch to the more powerful interfaces described above.

For minimalists, who prefer to use keyboard shortcuts or menu items for mostly everything, Thunar will provide a very much stripped down interface, maybe adopting a few spatial features as well (but no strict adoption).