[Geany-devel] GtkFileChooser "recent" annoyance

[Matthew Brush]

On 12/20/2011 12:52 AM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
> Am 20.12.2011 05:07, schrieb Matthew Brush:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Is anyone opposed to me committing the trivial patch attached here.
>> The comment I think describes it well enough, and if you're using
>> recent GTK+ 2.24.x you probably already know about it.
>>
>> I didn't want to commit without asking since maybe some people will
>> find this new "feature"[1][2] useful, I personally find it extremely
>> annoying, but I wouldn't want to fix it at the expense of annoying
>> others.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Matthew Brush
>
>
> I quite like that it starts in recently used. $HOME is never the right
> location to save for me, so I always need to click. And recently used is
> usually less clicks because the last folder in there.
>

For me it shows no folders *ever* in there.  It does however show the 
last .avi movie files I played in VLC, some .tar.gz files I opened 
recently in file-roller and also the firefox binary from /usr/bin. Very 
useful for an editor that can only open plain text files :)

> You add in the comment that "recently used" is only one click away.
> However, the same can be said about $HOME.
>

Home was just a default since it's a decent starting place where all 
your files are below, though I'm not against using some other directory.

> Why is it so annoying to you? Do you often save in $HOME? "Recently
> Used" fixes an annoyance for me, and gnome page you linked describes it,
> that I save (accidentally) in $HOME.
>

See above about what files are shown and also that it only lists the 
basenames, so which of those last 20 `Makefile.am`s do I want to 
re-open?  The same could be said about other common filenames like 
main.c or index.html/php/whatever. Another reason was that it removes 
the Location text box where you type in a location, something I do 
often.  I did find out through experimentation that if you just go ahead 
and type, the Location box magically comes back and works, but it's not 
very obvious behaviour at all.  Lastly, it makes Geany's GTK+ open 
dialog even weirder on non-GNOME DEs.

> Slightly related: How do you make the file chooser (when opening a file)
> hide filename entry by default? In gtk+3 there's a dconf setting for it,
> but I don't know for 2.x.
>

I'm not too sure, and I'll probably only ever find out how to re-enable 
it, since I use this extensively.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush