I haven't used Thunar, but I wrote a GTK+-based file manager that was fairly popular Way Back When (late 90s, early 00s perhaps) called "gentoo".
Congratulations for landing a GSoC gig of course, that must be awesome. A project I worked on ages ago almost tried to apply, but all we got was the t-shirt. :)
My take on the ideas:
Undo/Redo sounds like a lot of work, at least if it is going to be integrated well and supported for many operations. Again I don't know Thunar, but I guess you're going to have to figure out if there is a command abstraction internally, and start storing a log of executed commands so that undo can compute the reverse action. I guess some commands ("delete" comes to mind) are really hard to undo without rather intricate changes such as inventing a trashcan and moving things there, and so on. It seems clever to start with this, it's a real heavy-weight.
File counts for folders sounds strange; if there's a size column I would of course assume it to show size for folders too, not a completely different thing like the number of contained objects. In gentoo there is an explicit command ("GetSize", if I remember correctly) that recursively computes the size of a directory, and replaces the on-disk inode-level size of the directory with that. It's explicit since it takes time (gentoo is not multi-threaded or async, so it will block) but on modern disks it will be very fast.
Picture-specific view sounds like a great idea, especially if it's possible to integrate it well so you don't have to re-implement a lot to get access to basic file management commands for that view.
Ah, cool I was not aware of the Trash spec [1]. I had to check the date on it, it seems to have originated in 2004 and I think I was past peak gentoo development at that time. Or maybe I just didn't spend enough time keeping track of FreeDesktop. Thanks for clueing me in!
For what is worth, I used Gentoo for some time many moons ago and it was pretty good, aside bringing back that DOpus feel from the good old Amiga days, however I found later than I didn't need all these functions and having a few icons on the taskbar opening Rox-Filer instances on the most used directories was faster. But anyway, thanks for creating it; it was a pretty solid piece of software.
This is great to hear! I use thunar mostly because it doesn't force me into tabs like the "big name" file managers all seem to do. It is snappy and stable and does almost everything I want.
Right mouse drag. Please. If you want a demo, fire up Windows, grab a file or folder with the right mouse button and pull it somewhere. When you release the right mouse button you get a menu, ie: move, copy, create shortcut etc. Even after using Linux almost exclusively for 15 years I still miss this.
Congratulations for landing a GSoC gig of course, that must be awesome. A project I worked on ages ago almost tried to apply, but all we got was the t-shirt. :)
My take on the ideas:
Undo/Redo sounds like a lot of work, at least if it is going to be integrated well and supported for many operations. Again I don't know Thunar, but I guess you're going to have to figure out if there is a command abstraction internally, and start storing a log of executed commands so that undo can compute the reverse action. I guess some commands ("delete" comes to mind) are really hard to undo without rather intricate changes such as inventing a trashcan and moving things there, and so on. It seems clever to start with this, it's a real heavy-weight.
File counts for folders sounds strange; if there's a size column I would of course assume it to show size for folders too, not a completely different thing like the number of contained objects. In gentoo there is an explicit command ("GetSize", if I remember correctly) that recursively computes the size of a directory, and replaces the on-disk inode-level size of the directory with that. It's explicit since it takes time (gentoo is not multi-threaded or async, so it will block) but on modern disks it will be very fast.
Picture-specific view sounds like a great idea, especially if it's possible to integrate it well so you don't have to re-implement a lot to get access to basic file management commands for that view.