From: Juerd Date: 08:16 on 22 Jul 2004 Subject: Open/save dialogs that do not start in ~ My home directory has everything. I have my own structure within my home directory, but it'd be great if things would just start their open/save dialogs right there. Certainly not in /, or a hidden directory anywhere. OpenOffice.org is now sane enough to respect the mighty ~, but still too many programs don't seem to understand how most people work. For instance, xmms defaults to /. Perhaps they assume that everyone who has music, is a home user who has an mp3 disk mounted somewhere; I don't know why they do this. Juerd
From: Philip Newton Date: 09:08 on 22 Jul 2004 Subject: Re: Open/save dialogs that do not start in ~ On 22 Jul 2004 at 9:16, Juerd wrote: > My home directory has everything. I have my own structure within my > home directory, but it'd be great if things would just start their > open/save dialogs right there. Certainly not in /, or a hidden > directory anywhere. And if they don't start in ~, at least it would be useful if they'd start in the last directory there were in... if I frequently open documents from one directory or save them there, it's annoying having to navigate there from some funny directory under the app's bin directory every single boring time. I hates them. Cheers, Philip
From: Aaron J. Grier Date: 23:42 on 22 Jul 2004 Subject: Re: Open/save dialogs that do not start in ~ On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 10:08:19AM +0200, Philip Newton wrote: > And if they [directories] don't start in ~, at least it would be > useful if they'd start in the last directory there were in... if I > frequently open documents from one directory or save them there, it's > annoying having to navigate there from some funny directory under the > app's bin directory every single boring time. I hates them. or file dialogs which won't let you type in the name of a directory. or let you type in a directory but then lose the filename. HATE! graphic dialogs seem to be specially useless with amd, but amd is a piece of hate all its own...
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 13:41 on 22 Jul 2004 Subject: Re: Open/save dialogs that do not start in ~ > My home directory has everything. I have my own structure within my home > directory, but it'd be great if things would just start their open/save > dialogs right there. Certainly not in /, or a hidden directory anywhere. I'm not sure that "~" is always the right choice, but it's probably the best possible default and would sure beat the heck out of some random directory under their installation directory. Best would be "the current directory inherited from the parent", which would *usually* be ~ and if it's not there's probably a good reason for it. Ideally they'd remember the last directory you saved or loaded that particular file from and use that. What I hate are programs that do something weird with the current directory for programs they run. For example, "trn" always changes to "~/News", so instead of saving files in the directory you're working from they always go there and you have to "^Zmv ~/News/whatever .; fg" ROX Filer insists on going through the following shenanigans: You start out in some random directory. You're viewing directory "~/something/some name/" You double-click on some file. ROX looks up the handler for that file. ROX starts that handler... not in ITS directory, and not in the directory you were viewing, but in $HOME. And the file name it passes to the file may not be the one you expect if there are symlinks in the path. I don't remember if it forcibly expands symlinks or not, but it was weird. The author refused to accept any patches to change this behaviour. He often opens stuff in CDs and doesn't want to have to quit the program to pop the CD out. He won't even accept a patch that makes it an option, because he doesn't want to add any options he doesn't think people need, because they're too confusing. What I'm supposed to do is, FOR EACH HANDLER, create a script that figures out what the directory is supposed to be based on the file names, cds there, and pulls up the program once its there. This is less confusing. I guess. This was the final straw that decided me on buying, upgrading, and switching to a Mac. Metal finder pisses me off, but it doesn't piss me off as much as the fact that there are precisely zero open source file browsers that don't piss me off more.
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