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List:       kde-look
Subject:    Re: Standard questions and answers
From:       Rik Hemsley <rik () rikkus ! demon ! co ! uk>
Date:       1999-09-18 0:26:29
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#if John Summerfield
> At the moment, I'm looking at a dialgue that gives four choices:
> 	OK
> 	Browser
> 	Clear
> 	Cancel
> How does this fit?
> I actually want to save the file; I'm running kfm and clicked on a link to 
> a tarball!! Guess I have to break out netscape.

KFM has a few serious UI problems. This is one of them. There's no way
to easily save a file. You have to be able to drag and drop it somewhere,
or use copy + paste.

Often want to download something like the latest Vim patch, but my desktop is
perpetually hidden by a konsole window and a Vim window.

A simple, and possibly even 'correct' solution to this would be to provide
another item on the popup menu: 'Copy to...'. This seems logical - it should
work for remote + local files. You would then be presented with a 'Save As'
dialog. Lovely. It would be nice to be able to assign a key to this, e.g.
shift-left-click (have you noticed kfm doesn't have a key bindings dialog ?)

This sounds so easy, I don't know why I never bothered to implement it myself.
I suppose I didn't think of it until now.

Next issue: That 'Open with...' dialog. This is an example of a dialog that
should have 'Ok' and 'Cancel' buttons. It should _not_ have 'Browser' and
'Clear' on the same button row. 'Browser' is not a valid response. Consider
the conversation:

Open with: (kedit) ... OK !
Open with: (kedit) ... Cancel !
Open with: (kedit) ... Browser ! (?)
Open with: (kedit) ... Clear ! (?)

'Browser' and 'Clear' are not logical reponses to what is required by the
dialog. The 'Clear' button is redundant IMO. If people use this to clear
a QLineEdit, fair enough, but it still shouldn't be logically connected to
the 'Ok' and 'Cancel' buttons.

The browser should either be shown by default (and why not ?) or there should
be a different button. Perhaps a '...' button to the right of the QLineEdit.
This is common - I believe many apps use it (I use it in Empath to suggest
that you may browse for the input for this QLineEdit).

So, to summarise:

1. I believe that the kfm 'Open With' dialog should look like this:

 -------------------------------------------    '...' button opens browser
|             ----------------------   ---  |    'Ok'  is default button
| Open With: | gvim                 | |...| |
|             ----------------------   ---  |
|                          ----   --------  |
| |X| Run in terminal     | Ok | | Cancel | |
|                          ----   --------  |
 ------------------------------------------- 

2. The kfm context menu (over files) should include a new item, 'Copy to',
which brings up a standard 'Save As' dialog, and will perform a download
action if necessary, acting as dragging a file to a folder would have
done, except that the file being copied may be renamed before it is written.
 
Comments ?

Cheers,
Rik

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