Hacker News Reader

Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

Picking directories has been pretty broken forever as well. Say you start in ~/Downloads/foo and want to store the file in ~/Downloads, then navigating up will have "foo" selected, with usually no blank space to un-select (so you'd need to do ctrl+click or something to that tune); clicking "Save" (or whatever) will then descend into that directory instead of saving, so just using the mouse, or not using any shortcuts, you really can't do this.

This, other UX and even performance (!) issues that have been mentioned in siblings as well as TFA makes the Gtk file pickers easily one of the TOP10 reasons to avoid Gtk and Gnome for anything.

The interaction design of these dialogs is simply shit. Windows (and also KDE, which has been using a copy of the Windows dialog for about 20 years) show how to do it correctly.

View on HN

Window's UI is not really an upgrade though. All the fake roots (why the heck is the Desktop the root) and the forced broken navigation therein, the removal of up so you have to navigate everything like webpages, treating some folders like databases and others with duplicate names like standard folders, hiding extensions, and the 'My Computer' naming madness.

KDE is the best desktop experience available.

For Linux, I agree.

There's "Up one folder" button and keyboard shortcut in Windows. Button is placed next to weblike Back and Forward buttons. It works according to path displayed next to it and you can even click the elements of the path to go up as many levels up as you want with single click.

I agree that KDE still feels better though.

That's true but annoylingly it doesn't always take you up one folder. For example If you click it from Desktop, it takes you to the whole PC instead of to your home folder.

Windows (the operating system) does the same thing. If you open your “Documents” folder from your “Quick Links” in the sidebar, going “up” takes you to your Quick Links “folder”.

It’s even worse in MacOS. No matter how much I try to use Mac, I am always so disoriented by the filesystem and the “Finder” (filesystem browsing interface).

Wow I never thought about Ctrl+Click to deselect in that situation. I've probably wasted at least an hour of my life by giving up and re-opening the window in a different way. Thanks!

(I actually asked someone more knowledgable about this once and was told that it's my fault for using the file picker incorrectly and I simply need to stop doing that.)

Can't take credit for that — someone told me to use ctrl+click in this situation after I ranted about it elsewhere.

One thing I was happy to discover as a kid was shift + tab to go backwards with input selection (Spacebar to trigger checkboxes was nice too)

These shortcuts have been a thing for quite a while too, they come from the IBM CUA guidelines [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

I'm a regular user of the CUA guideline's copy/paste shortcuts. Those shortcuts work in pretty much every MS OS from the early 1990s until recently. Linux has been a mess, but KDE has been pretty decent at enforcing global shortcuts.

The past 5 years though have been a nightmare, MS has really messed their UI up, and various applications/toolkits or whatever the problem no longer properly support the CUA guidelines which in the past were the one assured way of doing an operation cross applications and various OSs (windows+linux/kde).

Maybe its time to start going to a few developer conferences and giving talks about how useful system wide shortcuts that work across multiple OSs really are.

I tried C-shift-A, but didn't work.

Control click seems to work.

Thank you for the accurate description. and it's also broken in xfce. I personally deal with this annoying situation by ascending to the grandparent and then descending to the parent again.

I recall this being a problem, but I just tried it in Gnome+Chrome and it worked correctly and the picker 'looks native' at least. Then I tried it in GIMP (which has a different picker) and it works like you describe.

Some other Gnome apps also work correctly so I think it's fixed in Gnome but not whatever GIMP is using.

GIMP is still Gtk 2 unless you're using a preview build.

Actually, I think the intended usage in this situation is to click on the filename field, then press Save (or Enter/Return). Which is still terrible discoverability, but at least it's theoretically possible?

> Picking directories has been pretty broken forever as well. Say you start in ~/Downloads/foo and want to store the file in ~/Downloads, then navigating up will have "foo" selected, with usually no blank space to un-select (so you'd need to do ctrl+click or something to that tune); clicking "Save" (or whatever) will then descend into that directory instead of saving, so just using the mouse, or not using any shortcuts, you really can't do this.

That's a degradation from 2.10, or 2.16, from time even before the 3.0.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com