Eric Wedel wrote:
btw, turns out the usability issue is a current topic of discussion.
http://www.newsarch.com/archive/mailinglist/gnome/desktop/msg05029.html
... and this dicussion is done since a long time ago.
There seems to be some sort of philosophical objection on the part of the gtk dialog developers to simply adding a text box.
Yes, the opinions on that lists do vary heavily. There seems to be some
people finding their meaning of life in this ...
Though how in the world a hidden dialog access keystroke is better, I don't know. Note that their proposed '/' to open the dialog is of little to no use on windows, where a path is often begun with a drive letter.
Hiding useful features might not be the best way of handling things, I
agree with you. IMHO letting you type some "invisible" letters to bring
up an extra dialog is a bad idea in usability terms.
Don't suppose there's any chance that a path entry text box could be added to ethereal's existing "extra widgets" section of the chooser dialog? I'm thinking that would be a bit non-trivial, as it would involve connecting with the dialog's own state plumbing.
Well, that would be the wrong way to go. It's the job of that dialog to
do that.
I'm more and more thinking about a win32 specific file dialog (just
using win32 API) and let the GTK people do whatever they like to do on
this ...
Just a thought..
The gtk2 file open dialog does in fact permit entry of text pathnames. After bringing up the open dialog, type control-L and you will be presented with a little popup window where you can enter your path.
Did you tried all possible keystrokes? ;-)
Nice feature, but the dialog itself gives absolutely no hint that the feature exists. Major bug, imho.
Well, a major bug would be a crash.
But at least until gtk2 gets its act together, this makes it somewhat usable (and also lets us benefit from the scrollbar memory which gtk2 has and gtk1 has lost in ethereal).
As mentioned before, I use drag-n-drop so I won't come in touch with the
file open dialog at all :-) ... but with the file save dialog.
regards, Eric
ps: only tested in win32. Found this tidbit at this link:
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/04/03/16/2218241.shtml
Ah, there you get Ctrl-l from.
Regards, ULFL
