RE: RFE: User-Understandable Default folders in Home Directory

[Kyrre Ness Sjobak]

Sounds like a great idea!

Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 00:57:48 +1000
From: Stewart Smith <stewart(a)flamingspork.com&gt;
Subject: RFE: User-Understandable Default folders in Home Directory
To: Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop
        <fedora-desktop-list(a)redhat.com&gt;
Message-ID: <1092149868.3858.5.camel@kennedy>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

a bit like what OSX has, i've been thinking that a set of default
folders (with some cool icons) could help users a bit.

I've put this up at :
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=129564

simply so it's kinda 1/2 officially tracked, and in the future, people
with the same idea can (easily) find some track of discussion....

I propose adding the following to the /etc/skel for new users, with
funky icons on the folders to help increasing the clarity of where
things are and some hints on helping them organise things.

Note that with the introduction of things like ~/Contacts/, ~/Mail/
and ~/Settings, this gives the user a clear picture of where things
are, and what things are important to back up (if they so choose).

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.

~/Movies - for the kick-ass iMovie type thing that we so need.
~/Music - Music Player's place to put music!
~/Photos - Gthumb's place to go, and the digital camera tool!
~/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)

> > 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? 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.

I have no real expectation taht this will make Core3 in any complete
way, but is a good talking point and UI suggestion. This will make it
easier for users.

> > Why not? Its not like its hard to implement... 
-- 
Stewart Smith (stewart(a)flamingspork.com)
http://www.flamingspork.com/

BTW. what happened to the D-bus mail? would somebody please remail it? I
use diggest mode and i'm thinking that it was automagically deleted. (or
at least "scrubbed" - there was no body...

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.