from Hacker News

GTK File Chooser Dialog gets a thumbnail view after 18 years

by handity on 12/17/22, 11:41 AM with 200 comments

• by Svip on 12/17/22, 1:55 PM

  I wonder where this trend - fortunately a limited one - with putting confirm buttons at the top comes from? Humans naturally read from top to bottom. It naturally follows that the final action in any UI should be at the bottom.

  I find these buttons at the top extremely confusing, as I often - from my experience with reading - after I've dealt with the subject at hand (in this case, picking a file), assume the natural place to confirm my choice would be after it (i.e. below it).

  What are the UX arguments for placing the confirm buttons at the top of a dialog?

• by archseer on 12/17/22, 1:03 PM

  There's also a dramatic video rendition by the author: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_lLm3a33WsE

• by j1elo on 12/17/22, 1:57 PM

  A couple humorous takes on this:

  I swear that my initial reading of the title was "74 Decades Later", and I smiled because it fitted the feeling of how late this addition is arriving. Then I realized it'd be a bit strange that they used this kind of snarky sarcasm on their own blog, and had to re-read again the title.

  Also,

  > This is the culmination of more than a decade of work, and was only made possible by GTK4’s complete rewrite ...

  read to me as

  > this (lack of an essential and basic UI feature) was only caused by the typical "let's rewrite everything" movement that started more than a decade ago

  I know HNers are very sceptical of the technical merits (or their lack thereof) that ground-up rewrites usually have. I only hope in some years, GTK 5 or 6 doesn't decide to trash all this work and starts from scratch again.

  Regardless, my congratulations to the people who pushed through and contributed their effort to make thumbnails back!

• by christophilus on 12/17/22, 1:59 PM

  I always feel like I must be crazy because Gnome / GTK threads are always filled with comments about how terrible it is. Personally, I find it to be the most aesthetically pleasing and usable desktop environment I’ve used (having spent many years on Mac and Windows). I’m not sure what the disconnect is.

  Anyway, good thing we all have a wealth of choices. If you don’t like Gnome, there’s a huge universe of choices available to you! Long live OSS.

• by p-e-w on 12/17/22, 12:29 PM

  GNOME and GTK look spectacular these days. Even when I'm using macOS I now find myself thinking that GNOME looks better. The design is very uniform and coherent, and overall simply beautiful to my eye.

  If only the usability was as good as the visual design...

• by soulofmischief on 12/17/22, 2:03 PM

  > In the last post, we discussed deprecating treeviews and cell renderers, among other things. All these deprecations cause a lot of work for applications and libraries using these APIs, so why are we doing this?

  > One of the reasons is to enable new features. Such as a grid view for the file chooser. It only took us 18 years! You can see the original feature request in Bugzilla. This is easily possible now because GtkListView and GtkGridView can use the same data models.

  This is exactly why I do not use GNOME. Absolute insanity.

• by andrepd on 12/17/22, 2:08 PM

  Unfortunately they also lost tons of functionality in the process. The fact that typing on a file picker starts a recursive search instead of simply jumping to the file/folder with the prefix you typed, is nothing short of hilarious.

  Gtk-classic is the only thing that keeps me sane https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic

• by torginus on 12/17/22, 8:31 PM

  Imo the problem with Linux GUIs is that there are 2 kinds of devs working on it:

  - Those who want to bring about The Year Of The Linux Desktop and believe this can be brought about by removing every remotely complicated feature under the sun.

  - Those who think the only purpose of GUIs is to display multiple terminals side by side.

• by superkuh on 12/17/22, 4:20 PM

  Nice. Maybe in a handful of years there'll be applications besides GNOME itself that use Gtk4 and maybe the documentation will even exist. But right now the vast majority of applications use Gtk3 and Gtk3 has been frozen broken for a decade. Right now you literally cannot paste a file path into a file->open dialog without invoking some arcane key sequence to bring up the "path bar" first. If you just paste into a newly opened file->open dialog it litterally errors out. That basic functionality does not exist, let alone a luxury like thumbnails.

  I've talked to the Gtk devs about this and they say that 3 is will not be fixed, ever. They won't even accept patches because gtk/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c is so cursed.

• by byhemechi on 12/17/22, 11:55 AM

  Does anyone else feel that gtk4 adwaita looks significantly worse than gtk3?

  they seem to have simply removed the gradients and it just looks half baked with only flat colours

• by amluto on 12/17/22, 8:24 PM

  > This is the culmination of more than a decade of work, and was only made possible by GTK4’s complete rewrite of its rendering system, and the introduction of highly performant and scalable list & grid widgets.

  I hate to be the person who just complains about Gnome, but… a few years ago, you could type into the file chooser, and it would search, quickly, for matching files and folders and display them. Then it broke and didn’t get fixed for years. Once it got fixed, you see matches, but if you actually try to select a matching folder, you hit really hilariously bad bugs that wouldn’t pass the briefest test.

  Maybe Gnome could focus on getting old functionality working?

• by gundamdoubleO on 12/17/22, 4:14 PM

  End of an era. The lack of thumbnails in the file picker was what started my KDE journey years ago. Doubt I'll ever go back to a GTK desktop but glad to see this finally implemented.

• by GrayShade on 12/17/22, 12:46 PM

  Yeah, I'd rather they fixed scrolling in large lists, which makes Nautilus almost unusable in directories with more than 500 items. So much for "scalable".

  And, ironically, touch support is currently broken, too.

  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2971

• by formerly_proven on 12/17/22, 1:58 PM

  Now fix your synchronous dbus calls to gvfs on the UI thread in the file dialog init code that hangs everything for 20s whenever gvfs shits the bed (not rare when you have more than a handful of mounts).

  That bug is probably similarly old as this one.

• by javaunsafe2019 on 12/17/22, 1:46 PM

  As for many others here in the comment section gnome went downhill for me after the migration to version 3. gnome v2 was such an easy to use, clean and fast experience and after that it degraded not only from the usability perspective but also resource allocation. Suddenly my PC was stuttering when using Linux cause I only had my cpu to render the ui

• by jrm4 on 12/17/22, 6:23 PM

  What would be best (and of course, exactly the sort of thing that Gnome would likely oppose) is to be able to choose your own file chooser -- it should be modular like that.

  The most annoying thing these days is how they're all different. I just want one (and honestly, I'd love it to be my hacky fzf solution, but again, modular)

• by criddell on 12/17/22, 12:42 PM

  I always wonder when people choose to use the word peformant if that’s what they really wanted to say. I mean it’s good that the grid works well enough to be considered functional, but is that really what they were shooting for? I suspect they meant to say fast or maybe fast and small.

• by bratsche on 12/17/22, 2:42 PM

  I really love all the great work the GTK developers have been putting into it!

• by paulcarroty on 12/17/22, 5:01 PM

  Hahah, congrats!

  This is not the technical problem, that's for sure. Maybe GNOME finally got a real UX expert from IBM :)

  I had few talks about it with GNOME devs, they said mostly "this is not a problem!" , "go fix it yourself!" and "we're volunteers, pay us". Most of it was in aggressive manner, just like in Trump supporters community.

  Glad I'm done with GNOME for now.

• by aeyes on 12/17/22, 4:42 PM

  The merge request even states that this was trivial to add...

  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/5163

• by nightowl_games on 12/17/22, 5:45 PM

  Theres always a ton of negativity associated with gnome. I'm just a basic linux user who doesnt have any problems, doesnt think about this kind of stuff. I think that's basically a glowing review.

• by mhd on 12/17/22, 6:40 PM

  That's the nice thing about the RiscOs way of saving and loading files, you never get in trouble because your file requester doesn't emulate all the features of your default file manager.

• by sussmannbaka on 12/18/22, 7:39 AM

  18 years of ignoring that patch out of spite :o)

• by 29athrowaway on 12/17/22, 8:34 PM

  I hope they fix the window switching issue that crashes gnome-shell and forced me to switch to another desktop.

• by n3storm on 12/17/22, 5:04 PM

  "Hay que joderse" as we say in Spain.

• by dtx1 on 12/17/22, 1:42 PM

  /g/ is gonna implode