RFE: User-Understandable Default folders in Home Directory

[Kyrre Ness Sjobak]

Sounds like a great idea!

Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 00:57:48 +1000
From: Stewart Smith <stewart at flamingspork.com>
Subject: RFE: User-Understandable Default folders in Home Directory
To: Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop
        <fedora-desktop-list at redhat.com>
Message-ID: <1092149868.3858.5.camel at kennedy>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

a bit like what OSX has, i've been thinking that a set of default
folders (with some cool icons) could help users a bit.

I've put this up at :
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=129564

simply so it's kinda 1/2 officially tracked, and in the future, people
with the same idea can (easily) find some track of discussion....

I propose adding the following to the /etc/skel for new users, with
funky icons on the folders to help increasing the clarity of where
things are and some hints on helping them organise things.

Note that with the introduction of things like ~/Contacts/, ~/Mail/
and ~/Settings, this gives the user a clear picture of where things
are, and what things are important to back up (if they so choose).

Some users may just see their mail as important, and not care about
contacts or music. Others may see Contacts, Mail, Settings and
Documents as important and can just (easily! with nautilus-cd-burner)
write these to CD for backup.

>> Just make that damn app work PERFECT first. I cant burn iso's with
it. It just refuses to do anything. But integrating K3B better with
gnome (and def. install if cd-burner is detected) would be great. (yeah
i know its really a KDE app. But who does really care?)

~/Contacts - where evolution stores contacts, with human-readable file
names (e.g. "Firstname Lastname.vcf" or something).
~/Desktop - same as it is now, the contents of the users desktop.
~/Documents - a suggested location for documents (and the default save
location for applications such as OpenOffice)
~/Mail - where Evolution stores it's mail.

>> This is called evolution today. But renaming it wouldn't be a to bad
idea - but it can create incompitability.

~/Movies - for the kick-ass iMovie type thing that we so need.
~/Music - Music Player's place to put music!
~/Photos - Gthumb's place to go, and the digital camera tool!
~/Web Pages - ==public_html (and shared by apache, if installed).

>> ~/Settings - would there be some enviroment variable (etc) most progs
will honor, which would make progs put their ".blah" - files there -
instead of the (unorganized) way its now - when everything is just
dumped at the ~/ ? It would make using apps that don't filter out such
files (read: JAVA file uploaders etc) easyer, as with sharing home dirs
with EvilOS (Windows)

>> Isn't there something like mini-icons on files/folders for Gnome?
Could this be integrated with KDE as well? And somhow stored (in some
hidden file inside the dir) so that it would be honored when sharing to
other machines that don't mount as ~/ over ex. NFS? Same goes to gthumb:
Its really anoying having to wait for it to recreate the thumbs when i
want to show the family the digital holyday pics on my laptop, over "11"
mbps WLAN, in a dir mounted over NFS. Especially when i just did on my
main machine. What about creating something like Thumbs.db, which are
read by nautilus and gtumb (etc.) - but make it possible to turn the
feature off.

I have no real expectation taht this will make Core3 in any complete
way, but is a good talking point and UI suggestion. This will make it
easier for users.

>> Why not? Its not like its hard to implement...
-- 
Stewart Smith (stewart at flamingspork.com)
http://www.flamingspork.com/

BTW. what happened to the D-bus mail? would somebody please remail it? I
use diggest mode and i'm thinking that it was automagically deleted. (or
at least "scrubbed" - there was no body...