Subject: Re: File Open: Okay, I'm an idiot!
From: David Shochat (shochat@acm.org)
Date: Tue Sep 26 2000 - 04:32:11 CDT
James Silverton wrote:
>
>
> As I said, I don't feel very strongly about it but I would like to be
> told in advance that a double click is necessary. I'll admit that I run
> Linux on a dual boot machine and still use Word under W98 because it
> does word processing tasks in the way that I want; addressing envelopes
> is one. However, I chose the option to eliminate double clicking under
> Windows as far as possible. The only place that I normally use double
> clicks is Netscape. I'm not a Mac person at all.
>
I think the double versus single issue you're referring to there is
unrelated to the two ways of descending into a directory in the file
dialog. In the first case, the "single click" means (as in a web
browser), that you can visit an item by single clicking on a reference
to that item. In the case of the file dialog, it's a two step process:
1. click to _select_ the item (this highlights the item for visual
feedback)
2. click the OK button (or just hit the enter key since in this dialog
OK is the default button).
The associated double-click convention is that double-clicking an item
in the list should be equivalent to the combination of those two steps.
I think of this as a Mac convention which was later adopted in Windows
and now also in Gtk and thus GNOME (don't know where Qt/KDE stands on
this). I tried several other GNOME applications and most of them follow
this convention in their file open dialogs, i.e. you can use either the
two-step method or the double-click method.
I don't think there is a Unix convention, but a lot of Unix applications
seem to have a Motif-like file dialog which I have never gotten used to
(involving the "Filter" button). Personally, I'm not sorry to see Gtk
abandoning that in favor of the Mac/Windows style. I was about to say I
like having the same look and feel on Linux and Windows but that would
be a lie. I use implicit focus on Linux (and on CDE at work).
-- David
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Sep 26 2000 - 04:31:27 CDT