Arvind Narayanan wrote an essay outlining three proposals for simplifying GNOME file management.
Simplifying GNOME file management
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I can never understand why the folders and files paradigm is so hard for users to grasp.
I think part of the problem is that save/open dialog boxes don’t make the idea of a file hierarchy central to the user interface. And many programs don’t even tell you where your files are, and require configuring through complicated menus.
But please leave users who want to work differently with their files the ability to do so and on a side note, please give users an easy way to access their hidden files with nautilus.
I agree with almost everything said in there. However I feel that it would be better to have virtual folders accessable as the user sees fit, rather than forcing people to have directories named certain things.
Instead of having ~/documents ~/music, etc. they could be items like Music:// and Documents://, etc that would automatically list music, documents and whatever other file types that a user might want.
Put them on the desktop by default when a document of a certain type is made, but don’t force users to have certain directories always on.
Universal find would be very useful. Integrating it into Nautilus’s location dialogue would probably work very well.
And it would make sense for nautilus and epiphany to share a bookmark system (if not the bookmarks)
I’ve been working somewhat on a small app that should act as a tree/bookmarks/and even perhaps as a ‘shelf’ for Spatial Nautilus that will I think make Spatial mode more acceptable to a wider range of users.
Its being discussed here:
http://www.dropline.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2794
The thing they are talking about already exist! With Mac OS X our kids who don’t know much about computers were able to rip their cd’s and play it from the harddrive without asking us for help. And they will never care about where on the harddrive their music files is!
Sorry but the suggestions make no sense. Imaging the first example: It should be a good idea for Alice to store “application-form.pdf” or “interview_tips.html” into “~/Job”. And indeed it does.
A few lines later it’s said that “If you downloaded a PDF it would let you choose between Download/, Printing/, Books/, and Other.” Now where is “~/Job”?
The point is: Developers can’t think of all possiblities and also computer can’t. Sometimes even the user can’t decide where a file should be stored in.
While the idea sounds nice in the beginning, it assumes more knowledge than computers have. If a user can’t organize his own files, the computer won’t be able to help. It may even make things worse by saving stuff where the user don’t wants him to.
However, if this will be implemented, hopefully someone takes care that the locations can easily be changed by default and during the operation.
But even then people will still have problems finding their files because some open/save dialogs and file managers sort the files “ABa”, others “AaB” and the next sorts according to file extensions (MPlayer)! The same directory and three possible views! Why should people be not confused?
Additionally, not cutting filenames in the file manager also confuses people. Adding a new file with a “too long” name will reorganize the view on the folder (ROX and Nautilus, at least). Since people remember locations more easily than names, such a reorganization breaks their internal map (“No, the file you’re looking for is not in the second column and third from the right like it was last time you looked. Sorry!”).
Try to buy something in a supermarket you’ve never been before if you don’t believe this. Cutting filenames (and fixing image preview to the same size) will break the map only in 50% of all occasions on average when a new file is saved in the directory (depending on the distribution of the first character). Usually this is seldom enought for people to catch up. Then they will be able to really remember where their stuff was last time they looked, IMHO.
But what if it applied to all apps, and was part of the UI Guidelines (not that anyone every reads them anyway).
What if the Word Processor forced you to put your Resumé in ~/Documents (or even better, forced you to add Document Metadata (other than “Author: TK”)?
What if you could search for a particular Document using the Meta-Data of Artist, Author, Subject, Title, Content, rather than obscure things like Size and Bitrate?
HFS+, ReiserFS and XFS all support Extended Attributes, but Finder and Nautilus don’t make use of them.
Then not only would Alice’s Resumé be in the ~/Documents Folder, it would also be searchable in the find Dialog, using the strings “Resumé”, “Curriculum Vitæ”, “Alice Smith” or “Springfield Elementary School”.
but using Document:// and Music:// adds another abstraction the user doesn’t need. Keeping files in a Hierarchal Filesystem keeps the concepts required for the Newbie to learn to a minimum.
Then what if another App hijacks the Music:// Protocol, or a Virus replaces Music:// with rm -f ?
at least with a structured (non-abstracted) Filesystem, the user will know exactly where the file is, rather than “somewhere in my music collection”.
If the Abstraction Fails for some reason, the User can still open up ~/Music and browse through “SpiderBait” and “ShaShaVaGlava” to “Ol’ Man Sam.m4a” using a simple interface.
What is there for a newbie to learn? For all intents and purposes to a newbie, the folder Music on the desktop is the only item they would ever see in relation to it. While in actuality it could points to music:// instead of a normal directory, and music:// can contain everything from ~/music, /music, /mnt/music, or .gnome2/music.
I don’t see what there is to Hijack as far as the protocol, it should be treated exactly like a file. Does it matter if both Rhythmbox and Totem use music:// as the default directory to open when looking for files? And I have yet to see a virus take advantage of any of the exsisting URIs used in gnome.
I guess what I’m getting at here, is that while for the novice, music:// and ~/music might be exactly the same thing, it provides far greater flexibility, in that it works even if you don’t have ~/music, and would work no matter where your music files actually are.
And I decide what rooms go in it and what goes in those rooms. It’s a rule that a distro does not touch /usr/local and it should equally be a rule that an application does not touch $HOME in any visible way. I refuse to use any application that creates visible directories in my home unless I really want it and then I make it so that it doesn’t. If I can’t prevent it, I don’t use it.
I do not mean this in an elitist way (I’m the last person capable of being elitist) but his Alice is a stone cold moron. He describes an almost literal zombie. She ‘subconsciously’ does all this? Well, you don’t take medication and run heavy machinery. You shouldn’t be running a computer as a zombie, either.
I’m not saying everyone has to be a hacker genius and I’m not saying you shouldn’t cater to usability for the technically challenged but this just goes too far.
Files and directories are *not* a hard concept to grasp, *especially* when the user creates them. They *may* be confusing if the user has no input into them and they just appear according to the whims of how some programmer thinks *my* files *should* be arranged. If the user can’t take the effort to organize their files, they can’t expect to find them. Simple as that. Even then, there are a host of tools to enable them to do this anyway – locate, find, etc.
But my $HOME organization is up to me.
This is remarkably bad idea, but reflects a mindset that is becoming distressingly widespread. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and the road to the moronizing of Linux is paved with the desire to ‘take the desktop’.
We don’t need protocol:// for everything.
We have folders already.
Nothing else to be said.
The author has some very interesting ideas, and his file/folder scheme is a pretty interesting idea.
The problem is, he says he wants users to work in terms of tasks, but his folder scheme is still based on the TYPES of files the user is er…using. So, if I’m working on XYZ corporations website, I’d have an XYZ directory under Images (mg gimp XCFs), Documents (their content they’ve sent over), Video, Fax (all their contracts), Download (their PDF forms), etc etc etc.
It makes one kind of sense to have the author’s suggested layout. That is, the sense that an every day home user would have. Because the file’s overriding perogative is that it IS an image, it IS a music file, it IS a document. But in a corporate workstation, that same logic doesn’t apply because I’m working with multiple sets of files for multiple people. The files overwhelming virtue isn’t that it’s an image or a document, it’s an image or a document belong to XYZ company, or ABC company, or DEF company.
A compromise might be thus: What if you assigned a directory in your Home for individual tasks that then contained the author’s file structure that was created on his “as needed” basis?
To keep going with my precious example, I might have four directories in my Home folder: “Personal”, “Car Research”, “XYZ Company”, and “ABC Company” and EACH one of these has a Screenshots directory, a Documents, an Images, etc. It’s also easy to save and open because when I’m saving a PDF I see a list of relevent tasks and I simply choose which one of those tasks this PDF belongs to (XYZ Company’s forms for instance) and it gets auto saved in the “Documents” underneath. And when I right click and save an image of that hot new Mustang, I click “Car Research” and it gets saved to the newly created Images directory inside there. And of course, my blog posts, MP3 collections, and Image arch-ive (~_^) all get saved underneath “Personal”.
This might seem like one more layer of abstraction, but I think it’s more “real-life” task based as opposed to “cyber space” task based; plus it more accurately mirrors how your averge person might think.
All this said, aren’t these reasons part of the argument for metadata/database filesystems like Gnome Storage?
So….Did that make any sense or am I just full of it?
I like your suggestion, and it fits in with where computings going these days (Both Windows & OSX are going task based.
So, you create a new task as opposed to a folder, say your on a website and wish to save an image for that task, you save it in the task folder, and it gets put in $Task/Images. Nice.
Take over metadata from other files. It would be nice if when you ‘save’ your file, you can search for other files, and drag metadata from them over to your file.
Why bother? Linux is fine as it is. If you want Windows, use Windows! Don’t turn Linux into a dumbed down entertainment centre like Windows is. I don’t want shiny “My Pictures” and “Kazaa” icons, and I don’t want task-based GUIs or advertising on my desktop.
RISC OS simply had an icon and a text box to type in a name. The user most know where the file goes because the must drag it to a folder or disk icon. This also saves the code needed to re-implement a semi-file-browser for your save dialog and thus improves overall consistency.
Really, I don’t like filesystems or files at all. I have grown accustom to searching a lot more these days, for example I have given up sorting my email, and Thunderbird has a really nice quick search text box, so I let it accumulate in my inbox. When you put something in to a directory you are really associating it with the words in the path, but it is rigid (convenient for algorithms) and searching functions do not often check the path in a query.
I hate the idea of something being so easy that the technicalities are forgotten. If I want to rip a CD, I want to be able to specify where it goes. I don’t need someone else telling me where my music should go; I like to KNOW where it is, so that if I have to back stuff up, I can do it. Nothing bothers me more than not knowing where my files actually are!
If computers become so easy to use that some dumbass who knows nothing about computers can be efficient, we’ll eventually forget about all things technical… nobody will really know how any of it works. We have to know how things work in order to improve on them, or we risk the loss of all technology, because the next generations won’t be able to grasp the concepts we use these days in computer science. I like file management the way it is.
If computers become so easy to use that some dumbass who knows nothing about computers can be efficient, we’ll eventually forget about all things technical… nobody will really know how any of it works.
This is already happening, even to programmers (people are scared of assembly and even C), because of overuse of high-level APIs and languages. Anyway, I’m not against making computers easy enough for people who would otherwise not be able to use them. But there is a difference between simplifying the system so that a user can more readily understand it, and simplifying the *illusion*, where everything is hidden, and your computer is controlled by foreign developers, people with technical know-how and spyware writers. This is the direction of Windows, and maybe GNOME, and it is the wrong one.
I like file management the way it is.
Meh, I don’t. But I agree that I HAVE to know where everything is. Otherwise you loose stuff… like everyone else I know. It’s not really thier fault, it’s the lazy and arrogant developers’ fault for throwing the user’s data all over the disk.
I’ll stick to organising my own files thankyou. Would be nice to have the actual directory structure simplified but I do not want to have to revert to searches to find files I’ve placed on my system.
People have always had to organize files (even when they were physical folders in file cabinets). Computers are not going to cure organization, people still need to learn it.
My only complaint with unix organization is the ~/.programname/ paradigm. My proposed change would be ~/.etc/.programname simply to clean up my `ls -a ~/` results.
Like many above I’m annoyed when programs assume where I want things saved. xchat is a prime example: How am I supposed to know everything I dcc ends up in ~/.xchat2/downloads/ ?
Spatial file management is a good idea. If it weren’t so annoying to go from /home/user to /mnt/cdrom/folder1/folder2. Seriously, that’s a lot of extra work closing out all those windows, and moving your mouse around to whereever all of them were placed.
“Spatial file management is a good idea. If it weren’t so annoying to go from /home/user to /mnt/cdrom/folder1/folder2. Seriously, that’s a lot of extra work closing out all those windows, and moving your mouse around to whereever all of them were placed.”
1) use middle click (0r)
2) right click and choose browse
“Example directories include Music, Audio, Images, Photos, Screenshots, Videos, Documents, Fax, Printing, Temp, Email, Download, Books, Publishing/Writing and so on.”
This has important issues regarding localization, and it would still be a partial solution. A user needs to learn to organize his data, and the apps job should be to enforce that need. I’d rather lean towards a more “radical” step; GNOME Storage would solve all your case scenarios well. As Seth Nickell puts it on his Storage page:
“Because information is accessed by content rather than by “location”, items installed by the desktop or operating system can be localized. No more “Music” or “Desktop” folders, or funny hacks with .desktop files that cause item’s names in the file browser to not match their path when you go into them”
the app that I linked to earlier is an attempt to somewhat allieviate the worst things about spatial browsing, without requiring you to have a full browser on standby. Basically the idea is to allow a way to quickly find directories that you can then open and manipulate with nautilus. Currently it acts basically as an organizable bookmarks list. Recursion support is being added, so that it can act like a tree, and also support for nautilus’s bookmarks is going to be added to allow it to operate as a frontend to that (which is otherwise unaccessable from the spatial nautilus. It is very much pre-alpha software right now.
Also, I think that the idea I expressed earlier could be handled with a single uri search:// all you’d have to do is add a way to handle adding search items to your desktop they’d look and act almost exactly like folders. I’m very much interested in whats going to happen with gnome storage. I hope that something along these lines makes it into Gnome.
I think one good solution to force people to organize their files for greatest effect with a spatial file manager is to make ~/ and desktop the same thing. whenever you save a file, it just drops onto the desktop, then you have to move it where you want from there. I know a lot of people generally reject this idea, and would be a bad default in the case of installing gnome onto a existing machine, its a perfect option for a pre-installed gnome distro on a corporate desktop, or a OEM box.
The problem is NOT the paradigm. The problem is the poor organizational skills of others. It seems to me that “folders and files” is a fairly easy paradigm to follow. People have been making physical files and folders for MANY MANY years. I think the problem is not with the paradigm, but rather the lack of organizational skills.
I consider myself a well organized individual. I keep my laundry organized in drawers and in my closet. I keep my important files like bills, forms, and paper documents in a well-organized file box. The file system on each of my computers is well organized. I know where EVERYTHING is! The problem may not be how things are organized, but rather we should be teaching people HOW to keep organized using the tools we have.
I recently built a PC for my Uncle-in-law. It was his FIRST computer. He was rather scared by the idea, but he knew he needed one and wanted to learn. One of the FIRST things I told him before he pushed the power button for the first time was “think of your PC as an electronic filing cabinet. You have files and you have folders. Files go in folders. If you keep things organized finding files and using files will be easy.”
He is using a WinXP machine and I showed him how to keep his My Documents folder organized. That concept was NOT hard for him to follow. First thing I did was make a “wallpaper” folder in his My Documents folder. In it are about 4 wallpapers of the Crimson Tide football team. (He is a HUGE Alabama football fan!) He knows that in that folder he can save images that he wants to use as computer wallpaper.
My father-in-law who is an insurance claims adjuster is surrounded by files, both phyical files and computer files. He keeps items regarding each claim in their respective folders. On his computer he has folders organized by claim number. ALL of his .doc files, .jpg images, and others regarding a particular claim are organized in 1 folder. (of course that folder may have an “images” or “forms” subfolder). Having everything organized in that manner “just works.” In speaking with my father-in-law prior to my post, he said to me “I can’t imagine my computer organized in any other manner. Files and folders makes the most sense.”
I think the ideas layed out are really good. I often feel that it’s harder to find things in Gnome than in Windows, but i can’t put my finger on why. Maybe the icons are just a little bit too small or something.
Anyway, for the crowd that wants to specify where stuff goes in their $Home, then Gconf could have a list of all the MIME types and the default folder they go in. That way people’s personal preference wouldn’t break the semi-intelligent system laid out in the arcticle. Instead of hard coding the application to put mp3/ogg in /home/user/music, it would look at the Gconf setting for mp3/ogg (which by default would probably be /home/user/music).
I think it’s pretty brilliant, but it’s probably not enough to satiate the “a man’s $home is his castle” crowd.
It’s incosistent. What about internationalization? Well, uh, we could rename the folders according to the locale. But what if several people with several languages are using one computer? Well, uh, we could name the folders in english and make nautilus display the name each folder has the locale (like Mac OS X). But this also won’t work, because although not many joe average blah etc. user will use the terminal, there will always be apps who don’t use this translation, display the real folder names, and then confusion is even bigger as if there were just some 200 files in the home directory.
Although i liked spatial nautilus (most people don’t get the idea of it, i think), now i somehow feel what many people are complaining about: GNOME seems to have chosen to become the desktop for idiots.
If you can improve something making things easier for everybody, do it, if you can change something in a way that computer illiterates may have less problems, but pro users ave less possibilities, don’t do it! dummies are (hopefully) learning and then they are somewhat “pro users” for a much longer time in their life than they were idiots.
I think that is rather naive. I just counted my files: 142,808. That excludes the operating system, programs and configuration, etc. Believe me, I have taken pains to organise my files, and I think I have done rather well, to say. But I’ve found that the hierarchy model breaks down at about 10,000 or so… It is sparse and one-dimensional. It is impossible to express multiple relationships. Some things just don’t lend themselves to categorisation. Good files tend to get forgotton deep in the tree. Do I organise my music by artist, genre, album, year, what? The truth is, ALL OF THEM. These are all well-discussed issues.
“I like file management the way it is.”
Meh, I don’t. But I agree that I HAVE to know where everything is. Otherwise you loose stuff… like everyone else I know. It’s not really thier fault, it’s the lazy and arrogant developers’ fault for throwing the user’s data all over the disk.
Cut the crap, the onyl stuff that gets spread from one end of the drive to the other is because we have clueless idiots who insist on saving their documents in unconventional locations! idiots who INSIST on saving their documents in the root of C: or idiots who can’t organise themselves so instead of breaking the work down into folders and properly naming their files, they decide instead to shove their 1000 or so files into one big bloody folder, then they wonder why they can’t find a thing.
Sorry, what NEEDS to be taught to individuals is ORGANISATIONAL SKILLS something they should have either learnt at home or at school. The basic concepts of breaking things down into the relevant parts.
Thats why ~/.programnamerc never will become ~/.etc/programnamerc. There is far to much old stuff out there that will place configuration files directly in the home folder.
But I do agree that the cluttered home directory is a problem. However, I think that a more realistic solution would be to create ~/”My Documents” where the user could store their data and replace the $HOME icon that sits on most desktops of today with a “My Documents” icon.
The home directory icon could move to inside “Computer”. This way unexperienced people would not normally mix configuration files and documents. And as a result they would have less chance of deleting configuration files by mistake, or being bewildered by files application puts there without their knowledge.
I know this is a bit windowsish but I actually see that as a bonus. There are a lot of potential Gnome users in the windows crowd, and if we could make them feel a little more at home it would be nice. At least as long as it doesn’t hurt usability. And in this case I would say it would be an improvement.
Yes, I agree Gnome Storage would fix all this. But I wonder what will happen with the spatialnes in such an environment.
If you organize file by content, the same content may show up in different places. E.g content that show up as wordprocessor documents in one view, may also show up as “work last week”
As the amount of information handled by the user increases I think they will have to abandon the spatialness for a more search oriented way of finding and hanling files.
Just look how information is retrieved on the internet, most people use google or some other search engine, and tree like navigation structures like the old yahoo tree gets abandoned.
I’m thinking the spatial-ness is actually to prepare for Storage; just imagine queries as spatial objects (just like folders are now).
the thing that makes OSX soo appealing (at least to me) is that 1 app is needed for everything related (yeah there are gaps. and yes im still a x86 user (til i can afford a mac month after next)).. and i totally agree to his first point about alice and doing it all simply.. things like that will bring newbies to linux that much easier.. and its gnome.. not linux in general.. gnome specific apps use this scheme.. non gnomes apps dont have to..
:: shrugs ::
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rob @ http://sn0n.com
:etc: i do not reply to posts that ive posted. plz email w’ comments :/etc:
Arvinds article never says that it FORCES you to do it that way. You have the choice to change it. Maybe there could be a setup “wizard” the first time you run the app to decide whether to use the default or to manually config yourself. I think that his thinking is a GREAT idea.
I changed my grandmothers computer over to linux about a year ago, I was tired of having to fix things that she kept messing up, let alone all the virii she kept getting. She doesn’t play games and she doesn’t use Photshop or anything like that. It has been great for her. All her basic needs are taken care of.
I think my grandmother and people like her, is what Arvind is thinking of. But NOT to FORCE us into any one way of doing things. Just my thoughts on the subject.
Arvinds article never says that it FORCES you to do it that way. You have the choice to change it. Maybe there could be a setup “wizard” the first time you run the app to decide whether to use the default or to manually config yourself. I think that his thinking is a GREAT idea.
You don’t even really need a wizard, just an option somewhere, easily accessable (through the GUI if there is one) to change the default permanently (or until it’s changed again) for that application. Some types of applications already have these types of options, for instance CD Rippers commonly allow you to set a default folder in addition to the methods used to generate filenames. The only real difference is to make this an OS feature through some form of standardization, then the applications can be modified over time, either during normal patching or as additions to otherwise complete applications.
KDE and Gnome really have the most power to do something along these lines, with a large number of applications under their respective umbrellas and a large number of distributions shipping each environment.
As I see it, it’s no more harmful than the Windows “My Pictures” and “My Music” folders, except that in this case the directories aren’t created unless/until they are used (which is a better thing). It makes things easier for the beginners, and can always be changed by the more experienced users. The biggest mistake Windows makes in this area is making the option to change the location of this folder an obscure one, leaving power users with an empty set of folders on their OS partition.
I wrote some longer article as response to this nice essay, as I think the proposed solution are not far enough:
http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uxsm/MetaData-Filesystem.html
A filesystem is already a database of files so getting rid of directories is the same as getting rid of all the tables in your database and replacing them with queries for specific properties of the records.
This makes it brings in a significant speed penalty.
One problem that I’ve not seen any of the database filesystem advocates address is how the user will interact with such a system.
If files are organised according to mime-type or metadata in addition to some user provided parameters just as Arvind suggested, what advantage does getting rid of directories bring. Rather, I think (IMHO) a well designed find dialog can provide the features that can be expected from a MetaData database query dialog. In addition, you won’t lose the current paradigm in such a system.
I’m just trying to imagine how to build a project in such a directoryless filesystem would look like.
>sarcasm<
export CC=`select from filesystem where file_type=’executable’ and filename=’g++’ and file_version=’3.4.1’`
Make `select from filesystem file where code_type=’c++’ and author=’ali’ and project_name=’atlantis’ and project_version=’build1’`
>/sarcasm<