PCManFM 1.2.0 design ...
Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2014 12:26 pm
A couple of days ago I had a chance to try out PCManFM 1.2.0 in a live session of SliTaz rolling (which is still under development). I was impressed by its stability and its snappy operation but there are some issues and design choices I wasn't not so happy about:
- pull-down menus are only useful when there are at least 3 or more options to choose from. Using a pull-down menu to choose between Location view and Directory Tree view in the left pane makes switching between the views unnecessarily cumbersome. A simple toggle button in the toolbar at the top would have been better. I wouldn't even mind if the "open/close Side Pane" button had 3 states, so one could click through the Location/Tree/Off states of the pane. But I guess, that's a matter of taste ...
- vertical dotted lines in the Directory Tree view of the left pane are incredibly helpful when navigating through deep directory structures. What may look like clutter to some is actually very useful and shouldn't have been removed from the 0.5.x branch of the FM.
- in the detailed list view of the right pane the Permission and the Owner:Group columns are still missing. I do hope these important columns will be back in a future version of the FM.
- and lastly, I never cared much for the dumbed-down and convoluted way Nautilus, Thunar and others use to edit file and directory permissions and I'm disappointed to see that PCManFM now uses the same silly pull-down menus for this task. I always thought that the permissions window of the 0.5.x series was brilliantly simple and intuitive to use. Is there any chance we might get this back in a future version of PCManFM? (... that is, if enough people agree with me on this).
- pull-down menus are only useful when there are at least 3 or more options to choose from. Using a pull-down menu to choose between Location view and Directory Tree view in the left pane makes switching between the views unnecessarily cumbersome. A simple toggle button in the toolbar at the top would have been better. I wouldn't even mind if the "open/close Side Pane" button had 3 states, so one could click through the Location/Tree/Off states of the pane. But I guess, that's a matter of taste ...
- vertical dotted lines in the Directory Tree view of the left pane are incredibly helpful when navigating through deep directory structures. What may look like clutter to some is actually very useful and shouldn't have been removed from the 0.5.x branch of the FM.
- in the detailed list view of the right pane the Permission and the Owner:Group columns are still missing. I do hope these important columns will be back in a future version of the FM.
- and lastly, I never cared much for the dumbed-down and convoluted way Nautilus, Thunar and others use to edit file and directory permissions and I'm disappointed to see that PCManFM now uses the same silly pull-down menus for this task. I always thought that the permissions window of the 0.5.x series was brilliantly simple and intuitive to use. Is there any chance we might get this back in a future version of PCManFM? (... that is, if enough people agree with me on this).