Sunday, April 21, 2013

Simplifying GWorkspace

I am streamlining GNUstep's Workspace. For many years it had a mode for spatial navigation, inspired essentially from Mac's finder and by GNOME. I personally never felt that it fits well in OpenStep's paradigm. MacOS X incorporated it for legacy reasons of Mac Classic, becasue Apple (sadly) wrote a new Finder instead of using OS's Workspace.
Spatial is good, but I think having a manager which incorporates both philosophies not.

Thus I removed spatial navigation from GWorkspace. Some loyal users perhaps will mourn it, but I want to remember that GWorkspace is just one possible application to implement NSWorkspace, anybody can write a replacement. In fact, I have already plans to write an alternative version, but this will be material for other blog posts.

2 comments:

DMJC said...

I think it's a good idea to follow this up with some other tweaks to GWorkspace. stuff like allowing wider navigation columns than it has currently. Often filenames are a lot longer than what the file browser will allow you to view. I think attempts to update/modernise GWorkspace are definately warranted.

Riccardo said...

DMJC, I already have a patch submitted for that, but I need to review it. I delayed it because I had this more radical change in the works.