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Re: File open dialog: Where is my tab extension



On Fri, Jul 16, 2004 at 07:40:33AM +0200, Magnus Therning wrote:

 > Personally I can never understand the idea of looking at inferior,
 > but more widely used, systems and copy their behaviour. Why not
 > acknowledge the grand history of Unix (tab-completion is part of it)
 > and leverage it?

 Just for correctness' sake, "Unix" doesn't have a grand history of
 tab-completion, at least not in the context we are talking about here.
 Sven correctly argues that GNOME introduces an inconsistent user
 experience (you have tab completion in a lot of places -- e.g. programs
 using readline and many editors -- but in GNOME), but what you call
 "Unix history" is more like "GNU tradition".  Unix vendors rarely
 provided this sort of feature (an in those cases where they did provide
 it it was disabled by default).  They do provide other nice things.  In
 this context IRIX's Open File Dialog comes to mind.  It's amazingly
 irritating from a usability POV, _but_ it has this nice detail: the
 path you type gets "buttons" associated with it.  If you type
 "/some/random/path", there are two small widgets which take you to
 "/some" and "/some/random".  But then again, this goes against (or
 doesn't mesh well with) the current GNOME "shallow is better" way of
 thinking.

 But I disgres,

 Marcelo



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