about nautilus2.5.x change

changan

Spatial (or object oriented) means, that each window _is_ a folder. So you doubleclick a folder, you get a window and this window is the folder now. You can make the folder larger, smaller, move it around, close it. If you open it again, it will look exactly the same as it did when you closed it. Also such a folder window contains nothing but the contents of the folder and a menu. Absolutely no way to navigate around, absolutely no overhead.
The navigational view on the other hand is more like a "viewer to show folders". If you open a current Nautilus window, you don't see this folder as an object. You see an application, showing a folder and lots of UI to "navigate" to other folders.
So far so good.
Now what are the advantages of each window beeing a folder?
First of all, it's much simpler to understand. As soon as you realize that each window resembles a folder object, opening folders and accessing its contents becomes very straight forward and simple. In short: It's a usability improvement. Maybe this is not important for you, but for my mother who still doesn't like computers very much.
The next advantage is, that each window is a lot more "lightweight". You only get the contents. Nothing else. When I open the "Videos" folder from my desktop, I want to see the videos (and maybe sub folders) of this folder, nothing else. Currently it's loading the entire navigational UI which takes time (everyone wants Nautilus to be faster).
It also takes up a lot less of screen estate, so you can see more of the contents and drag and drop becomes a lot more convenient. Nautilus was always meant to be heavily drag and drop based (remember, the first version didn't even have cutting and pasting because of this!) but it was always a bit sucky to move several Nautilus windows besides each other because of that heavy UI.
As you can see, it has loads of advantages in cases, when you just want to see and access the contents of a folder, which you opened from the desktop. Even for hackers, I believe. If you want to access _anything_ else, that requires more sophisticated navigation, there is nothing stopping you from opening a new navigational Nautilus window.

Another reason why this split is important is, that Nautilus is finally getting a profile. Don't tell me it had one before, because that's a lie. Nautilus was never really navigational. It was an ugly mix between spatial and navigational (not unlike the Windows Explorer of Windows 95 actually). By default it's mostly navigational, but it still has spatial features. For example if you open a folder in a new window, it will store position and size for this respective window, which is completely illogical if you use it in a navigational way. It also is not perfectly spatial if you turn off all UI elements for various reasons.
Many people advocated for spatial because of the advantages, but other people (me included) always thought that getting rid of the navigational UI would be a major regression for many people. Thus, it never really got forward. This split will finally solve this problem. You'll get perfect and hopefully very fast spatial windows if you open a folder from the desktop, but the navigational Nautilus is NOT going away. In fact, it might become even better, now that it can get rid of all that spatial stuff and become 100% navigational. There is no need for compromises anymore. You can always open a folder in a navigational view instead and I'm sure, that it will also be possible to change the default for desktop folders, so they never open in simple spatial windows but always in bloatet navigational windows (not sure why you'd want that though, but it should avoid some pointless flames and make even the last one happy). Currently you can already set the catalog view or the terminal as the default for desktop folders (this actually works!), so I can't imagine that it won't be possible with navigational Nautilus.

Well I'm very tired and it took me way too much time to write this posting so I really hope that some more people are getting the idea now.



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