auto arrange icons on desktop by source/type

Bug #44563 reported by Martin Flack
30
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
nautilus (Ubuntu)
Won't Fix
Wishlist
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs

Bug Description

In general usage of my desktop I get various icons on my desktop that naturally come from various sources or are of certain types.

Also, over time my desktop becomes cluttered, and sometimes icons that appear dynamically actually appear under or over other ones which exasperates this.

I imagined a cool feature today that involved a sort of self-organizing desktop. I believe this would be novel and useful.

Here's the idea. It requires organizing icons nicely as they appear similar to "Clean Up By Name" but using appearance timestamp instead of name. It also revolves around the four corners of the desktop screen being anchors for different types of icons and for new icons to naturally appear in the correct corner, organized like this:

Origin Top Left: Home, Computer, anything pre-placed by the OS
Origin Top Right: Icons appearing in response to inserted CD/DVD's, USB sticks, etc.
Origin Bottom Left: Files created by local applications like OO documents
Origin Bottom Right: Files downloaded within Firefox or other Internet apps

I've offered a very simple type of logic - the top represents objects appearing from the system and the bottom represents objects appearing because of the user; the left is loosely "internal" or "made here" and the right is loosely "external" or "made elsewhere"

I'm not suggesting an actual visual demarcation, or a boundary which prevents the icons being dragged out of their "spot". What I'm suggesting is more like an organic growth, whenever nautilus realizes it has to add another icon to the desktop, choose the corner based on type, and then add the icon to that corner and then possibly resort the icons just in that corner as if by a mini-"Clean Up By Name" feature had been run there (although remember actually I'd like them to not be sorted alphabetically but to grow by placement timestamp).

Revision history for this message
Kyle Brooks (kyle-brooks) wrote :

this is a wishlist bug

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Thanks for your bug. I don't know how realistic that is, but that's not something that will be hacked soon. There is a "group by" feature request upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48525

Having specialized areas like you suggest is probably not possible, there is no way to know if a file has been saved from internet or from a local app. The sorting by timestamp is another feature request. Anyway if you have nice idea like that you should probably file bugs upstream where they are likely to be worked, as a distribution we fix bugs usually but new features tend to happen upstream (and if we want to work on one we work with upstream if possible anyway)

Changed in nautilus:
assignee: nobody → desktop-bugs
status: Unconfirmed → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Daniel Holbach (dholbach) wrote :

I'd personally suggest to write specifications for each and every feature you'd like to see and discuss them on the upstream mailing list. It's not really a "bug".

Revision history for this message
colchaodemola (colchaodemola) wrote :

Try this patch. I made it for gutsy , maybe work in other versions ...

Try:
apt-get source nautilus
cp 92_nautilus_keep_aligned.patch debian/patches
echo 92_nautilus_keep_aligned.patch >> debian/patches/series
dpkg-buildpackage
after the build , just install the new package

Now keep aligned option will work as an AUTOSORT by name function ...
Please post some feedback ...

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

What is this change supposed to do? Looking at the code that doesn't seem to be what the bug is describing

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

that's not something the ubuntu team has the ressources to work on, you should rather open the request on bugzilla.gnome.org directly if you still think that's something that would be nice to have, no other user request that since though

Changed in nautilus:
status: Confirmed → Won't Fix
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