RANT - Nautilus Loses Bookmark Management

25 Feb 2016

I've finally moved my blog from Google to something that works more or less without javascript (i.e. it's NoScript friendly) and is much faster - Poole, an easy to set up solution using Jekyll and Github. Looks great so far! From now on, there's no comment section - it was rarely used and I share my content mostly on my Diaspora account anyway, so feel free to comment over there or just email me.

In the past, I have given praise to a lot of what the Gnome team have done with their design decisions, even going so far as to defend them from the onslaught of critique they have endured. Because, let’s face it, the old paradigm is living on in Mate, you can still migrate to Xfce or LXDE if you don’t need more feautres, while Cinnamon and KDE offer you a more modern and shiny desktop with the old paradigm in mind. Be that as it may, I’m still lamenting the departure of the bookmarks.

This is just a personal rant, as this makes Gnome pretty much unusable for me, unless I consider using it with Nemo, which is more a hack than a real solution. I also finally realise what kind of file usage paradigm Gnome devs have in mind. From the beginning, I’ve been raised to keep files neat. Back when I started computing with the Amiga and later with Windows 95, file searches were not as responsive as today and so having a neat directory structure with all files adhering to sane thematic hieararchies has always helped me find things quickly. A spatial metaphor for files has thus been crucial. Take away things like bookmarks and have me rely on a search function (which in all fairness is pretty responsive on Gnome 3 and also finds everything I throw at it) and I’m terribly lost. Why? Well, because I rather have several revisions of files ordered by directory hierarchy than by filename. And so that document I should be opening should be in the top level directory, not in some deeper revision related one.

With the search, I only have a 2D representation (i.e. a path) at best, so I can’t make out the file version that quickly - I have to make an effort which I find unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong, I do use dates in filenames to distinguish their versions - it’s just that the spatial metaphor works better and quicker for me. Now, what does this have to do with bookmarks? Well, those are a bit like teleporters to me. Sometimes, my spatial logic makes me bury files somewhere deep - it makes me realise that said file is older or less often used. So, I need those bookmarks as quick portals to get there. Sometimes, I’ll keep them only temporarily, but a lot of them are permanent as well. I just hope they won’t ban the bookmarks from GTK altogether, as I’d hate e.g. Gimp or Inkscape to move to GTK 3 without having bookmarks in the file picker.