RFE: User-Understandable Default folders in Home Directory

[Michael Knepher]

Many of these suggestions touch on upstream issues, either regarding
GNOME/KDE settings, or for individual apps. As such, it might be useful
to approach some of these in the context of the freedesktop.org project,
rather than just as a Fedora-specific hack. In fact, I believe many of
these issues may have at least nascent specifications at
freedesktop.org.

On Tue, 2004-08-10 at 22:35 +0200, Kyrre Ness Sjobak wrote:
> Some users may just see their mail as important, and not care about
> contacts or music. Others may see Contacts, Mail, Settings and
> Documents as important and can just (easily! with nautilus-cd-burner)
> write these to CD for backup.
> 
> >> Just make that damn app work PERFECT first. I cant burn iso's with
> it. It just refuses to do anything. But integrating K3B better with
> gnome (and def. install if cd-burner is detected) would be great.
> (yeah
> i know its really a KDE app. But who does really care?)
> 
> ~/Contacts - where evolution stores contacts, with human-readable file
> names (e.g. "Firstname Lastname.vcf" or something).
> ~/Desktop - same as it is now, the contents of the users desktop.
> ~/Documents - a suggested location for documents (and the default save
> location for applications such as OpenOffice)
> ~/Mail - where Evolution stores it's mail.
> 
> >> This is called evolution today. But renaming it wouldn't be a to
> bad
> idea - but it can create incompitability.

Evo-2.0 now stores everything in .evolution. The configuration stuff in
there should *definitely* remain hidden. And the only system I've seen
that makes directly-accessible mail messages useful (and usable) is
BeOS, with the BeFS extended attributes essentially turning Tracker into
a mailreader. I don't see any practical reason to expose the message
store under the current filesystem/file-manager combo. Having a non-
evolution-centric message store that would allow users to easily switch
mail readers is another issue, but I still feel it should be hidden.

> 
> ~/Movies - for the kick-ass iMovie type thing that we so need.

Until there's a sufficient mass of free codecs and content, this is
probably better left on the TODO list.

> ~/Music - Music Player's place to put music!
> ~/Photos - Gthumb's place to go, and the digital camera tool!

These seem the easiest to add. What I'd like to see as well is to have
easily set-up and accessible system-wide directories for these types of
files that every user can read and write to.

> ~/Web Pages - ==public_html (and shared by apache, if installed).
> 
> >> ~/Settings - would there be some enviroment variable (etc) most
> progs
> will honor, which would make progs put their ".blah" - files there -
> instead of the (unorganized) way its now - when everything is just
> dumped at the ~/ ? It would make using apps that don't filter out such
> files (read: JAVA file uploaders etc) easyer, as with sharing home
> dirs
> with EvilOS (Windows)

Most KDE and GNOME apps now keep their settings under .kde and .gnome2,
respectively. A third spot for "unaffiliated" apps would need upstream
buy-in rather than patching every app.

> 
> >> Isn't there something like mini-icons on files/folders for Gnome?
> Could this be integrated with KDE as well? And somhow stored (in some
> hidden file inside the dir) so that it would be honored when sharing
> to
> other machines that don't mount as ~/ over ex. NFS? 

These are called emblems in Nautilus. I don't recall if konqueror
supports anything similar. Sharing them between KDE and GNOME would best
be a freedesktop.org spec. I'm not sure where nautilus currently keeps
the settings.

> Same goes to gthumb:
> Its really anoying having to wait for it to recreate the thumbs when i
> want to show the family the digital holyday pics on my laptop, over
> "11"
> mbps WLAN, in a dir mounted over NFS. Especially when i just did on my
> main machine. What about creating something like Thumbs.db, which are
> read by nautilus and gtumb (etc.) - but make it possible to turn the
> feature off.

The most recent versions of gThumb have a preference setting to turn off
thumbnail display, and nautilus has preferences for displaying
thumbnails, such as "local files only", or only thumbnail files under a
certain size, etc. It might be nice for gThumb to have similar settings
or to be able to require it to follow nautilus' settings.