Sidebar features

[Papermanzero]

Hey everyone,

i am currently working on some sidebar features for nemo. I hope @mtwebster could possibly support because I am not sure if this is a good approach or not. My original idea to make the sidebar with custom labels is indeed not a good way to go, because bookmarks are sufficient to create everything a user needs.

After looking into the code and the current behavior I wanted to align some aspects in mint to have the same look and feel.

I shifted the Desktop item from the sidebar to the XDG bookmarks to remove the hardcoded entry. So the user has still the Desktop item under „My Computer“ but can remove it, if necessary.

Then I added hardcoded items for „My Computer“ in a logical order. looking like that:

My Computer
— Computer (new entry)
— File System
— Home
— XDG bookmarks
— Favorites (only visible if Favorites are created)
— Recent Files (only active when activated in Mint)
— Trash

Moreover I added a new entry in File Management Preferences called „Sidebar“ under Plugins.

In this menu I added two options:
Sidebar Appearence and My Computer.
Under Sidebar appearence the user can select if he wants the default view with Places and Tree, only Places, only Tree. If the user selects Only places or only Tree, the icons in the bottom bar disappear and only the toggle button to hide or unhide the sidebar is visible.
under „My Computer“ the user can toggle which hardcoded element is visible in the sidebar. It is similar to the desktop option in which the user can toggle which items are visible on the desktop.
Default for on is: File System, Home, Favorites, Trash.
Default for off is: Computer

Last but not least I added an icon picker for bookmarks. Normally the default icon for a bookmark is selected but in some cases it would be great to change the icon. For instance „Templates“ is not taking the default icon in other system languages. I guess it is a bug but with the option to select the item from the current theme the user can correct it.

With those changes the administrator can make a very simple but efficient view for basic users.
„My Computer“ for a system view and „Bookmarks“ for a user view.

But I‘d like to have @mtwebster opinion about it.
My goals were:

• To make the sidebar flexible to meet user needs (which are requested in the forum and on github with tickets)
• To align the sidebar and its options with the rest of mint
• To add custominzation for simplicity (some are only using places, some are only using the tree view, others want another icon etc)

Nevertheless I have some challenges:

What happens to the XDG-Bookmarks if the user hides Home and Filesystem in the „My Computer“ preferences?

How to shift the sidebar visibilty icon to the left border if „only Places“ or „Only Tree“ is selected?

How to make the icon picker more intuitive (instead of adding a uri?

Does the sidebar have an icon for “Computer”?

Here would be the proposals:

0001-gschema.pdf
0002-global-preferences.pdf
0003-nemo-places-sidebar.pdf
0004-nemo-preferences-dialog.pdf

[JosephMcc]

I don't speak for @mtwebster. This would be just my own opinion

Under Sidebar appearence the user can select if he wants the default view with Places and Tree, only Places, only Tree. If the user selects Only places or only Tree, the icons in the bottom bar disappear and only the toggle button to hide or unhide the sidebar is visible.

No reason for this to be an option at all. It's going to far.

Last but not least I added an icon picker for bookmarks.

Same here. If there is some sort of bug, that should be fixed, but this option doesn't need to exist.

To add custominzation for simplicity

You mark this as one of your goals. There is no such thing. Every option you add, adds complexity. Period.

[Papermanzero]

Not for everything. The reason why desktop is hardcoded under „my computer“ does not make sense at all if you look at the rest of the logic in mint. Desktop is part of the home folder which is part of XDG bookmarks.
Moving Desktop to Bookmarks — fixes a real structural inconsistency. Adding Computer (computer:///) as an entry — gives access to something previously inaccessible. So those two fixes make nemo just cosistent with the rest of mint.

For the icon picker: Of course it makes sense. There are even some cases in which the current implemtation does not work. So an error icon is shown. For instance try to add the favorite folder to bookmarks. Error icon although the folder is becoming a bookmark. Don’t know if this is an Intention but I tried various combinations and sometimes you get an error icon. So the edge case to cover a missing icon is a custom icon and the code fixes this bug.

As alternative to the icon picker the edge cases must be resolved. A proposal would be:

static gchar *
get_icon_name (const gchar uri)
{
/ Hard-code icons for known virtual schemes that GIO cannot
* query icons for, since they have no real GFile backing. */
if (g_str_has_prefix (uri, "trash:///"))
return g_strdup (nemo_trash_monitor_get_symbolic_icon_name ());
if (g_str_has_prefix (uri, "recent:///"))
return g_strdup ("document-open-recent-symbolic");
if (g_str_has_prefix (uri, "favorites:///"))
return g_strdup ("xapp-user-favorites-symbolic");
if (g_str_has_prefix (uri, "computer:///"))
return g_strdup ("computer-symbolic");

}

And add a generic fallback at the very end of the function for anything that still comes back NULL or empty:

if (icon == NULL || icon[0] == '\0') {
g_free (icon);
icon = g_strdup ("folder-symbolic");
}
return icon;

The icon picker is still valid but narrower in scope — if there are specific URI schemes (network shares, custom mounts, unusual protocols) where the correct icon simply cannot be auto-detected, then a picker makes sense. But in that case it should be:
• Triggered only when no icon is found (not always available)
• Or limited to those specific URI types
Rather than a general “change any bookmark’s icon” feature.

For the rest I agree. It adds complexity but you cannot move forward without adding complexity.

But yes, The sidebar appearance can be dropped, the visibility/hide feature can also be dropped (actually it was a test what you can do with gtk3). It is also requested a lot of times in the community, so it would be a feature implementation for the community.

Everything else (desktop in xdg bookmarks, computer uri and icon picker) is for consistency through mint, for edge cases and bug fixes.