Ubuntu
nautilus package

Nautilus has poor usability w.r.t. the action choosen when dragging and dropping

Bug #82196 reported by Vincenzo Ciancia
2
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
nautilus (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Wishlist
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs

Bug Description

Binary package hint: nautilus

I apologize if this is one of those hot topics that have been discussed several times... however: when you drag a file from nautilus inside an open window, the action choosen e.g. copy, link etc. depends on "where" the target directory is located. This makes observable the difference between two directories in different hard-drive partitions, while it should not be so. Moreover, I think I would have serious difficulties teaching what is going on to my elder users. It seems to me that KDE's idea of popping the context menu up by default is a saner choice.

I recall that an usability principle I learned from the gnome2 HIG or whatever they were called, is that temporal evolutions in the way the interface responds to an user should be clearly marked - e.g. you shoud disable menus and not make them disappear. In the same fashion, having data get either copied or moved depending on where the target is located does seem to me a rather unobservable distinction. Could the popup menu on drop be made the default, and maybe a gconf key added so that aficionados can reset current behavior?

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

Thanks for your suggestion. The changes you are requesting require more discussion, which should be done on an appropriate mailing list or forum. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/forums/ might be a good start.

Having the context menu will just get in the way, you can dnd with middle click if you want to do that. The behaviour is not hard to get, dnd on your user directory move things, from other locations it will copy

Changed in nautilus:
assignee: nobody → desktop-bugs
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
status: Unconfirmed → Rejected
Revision history for this message
Vincenzo Ciancia (vincenzo-ml) wrote :

I thought it behaved differently - however it seems that the default action chosen for dropping a file is more complicated than what you described: even in my user directory, it is not deterministic: I just tried dragging a file from my home directory to my desktop. It moves the file. When I drag it back, it copies it!

I thought about that, and discovered that if your /home/myuser is a symlink, nautilus will feature this strange behavior: drag and drop in the desktop from the home will move, drag and drop from the destop to the home will copy. Shall I reopen and leave this as a bug editing the description?

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

There might be a bug already about the symlink problem, I think I've already that somewhere. Reopening the bug would be of no real use, there is hundred of nautilus bugs and thousand of desktop bugs already open and very few people on it. The bug will stay open for ages without getting any attention and make the lists of bugs harder to work with. The proper way to get that "fixed" is to draft properly how nautilus should behave dnd wise and then create a spec to implement that, the discussion would probably be better placed upstream because we don't want to make nautilus behave different on Ubuntu than upstream if there is no need for that

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