Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Konqueror feature request

In MS Windows, users are only given four or five file view modes, while in Konqueror the user has a multitude of options. This could be a good thing, but it can be quite inconvenient, because the user has to do too much to get from one desired style of display to another.

For example, the "Icon View with Large icons and even larger previews" is nice, but if I go to a folder with many files and I quickly scan through the file names, look at all the trouble required to switch to the equivalent of the Windows list view:
- Click View | View Mode | Multicolumn View
- Click View | Icon Size | Tiny
- Click View | Preview | Disable Previews

It is highly unlikely that the average user wants to use many combinations of these options. Even a power user would probably use only three to five combinations regularly.

Therefore, I propose to create a set of presets to replace this multitude of options. The view menus "View Mode", "Icon Size" and "Preview" would be replaced by a single "View Mode" menu which would contain a customizable list of presets like this:

==========
Large icons (= Icon View, large, with previews)
Small icons (= Icon View, medium)
Multicolumn list (= MultiColumn view, tiny, no previews)
Tree (= Tree view, tiny)
Et cetera
Other...
----------
Customize views...
==========

The "Customize views" item would display a dialog box that allows the user to customize the views. This dialog box would allow the user to select one of the existing views and modify settings for it. Views could also be created or deleted. For each view modes, the following options would be available:

- List of view modes (icons, multicolumn, etc.)
- Any options that are specific to the view mode
- List of icon sizes
- Checkbox: "Show previews"
- Checkbox: "Increase size of previews relative to icons"
- OR: a list of sizes for previews
- Checkbox: "Change sort order when entering this mode", and a list of sort orders
- Checkbox: "Use a custom background in this mode", and a button to bring up the "Background settings" box.

All this could fit on one dialog box if the lists of options are combo boxes.

The "Other..." menu item would bring up a smaller dialog box to change the current view settings, but without saving the changes as a new preset.

More ideas:
- Views could be hidden from the menu by having a checkbox beside each item in the list of views
- Each of the built-in views could be hidden but not deleted.