A project brought to you by the Xfce Design SIG.

Old ideas and discussions can be read in the page history.

Thunar offers two different side panes, a directory tree and a side pane with shortcuts, called the shortcuts pane. The shortcuts pane was not updated in Thunar 1.2 despite the functionality added by GIO, such as the availability to mount archives or browse remote locations. A straight-forward way to extend the current shortcuts pane would be to simply add the new items into the flat list that is shown under Current Design. However, we felt that we can do better and we are looking for suggestions on how to improve the current design to a) integrate the new features and b) look more appealing.
Git repository for test-code

Here are two screenshots of the current user interface of Thunar. The second shot is a good example of how cluttered the side pane looks as soon as more devices are attached to the computer:

• Mounted items like archives, remote locations and Samba shares are not integrated or shown at all. If we simply add them to the flat list of items in the current shortcuts pane, it will be increasingly hard to tell what is a personal folder, what is a volume, what is an archive etc. So I think grouping items by category (whatever “category” means here) might be necessary. But that is just one possible approach of many, I guess. — Jannis Pohlmann 2011/05/26 17:20
• Grouping and making the groups/categories collapsible surely helps, but I think keeping categories down not to produce a category-overflow is an important point. — Simon Steinbeiß 2011/05/27 01:13

Here's our list of categories, we still have to settle on what comes first (“network” comes last):

• Devices (shows internal partitions and external devices; internal partitions can be hidden)
• Places (shows xdg-user-dirs and bookmarks)
• Network (shows remote bookmarks and samba-shares)

GIMP source: http://users.xfce.org/~jannis/xfce/thunar-shortcut-button.xcf

• This would require a custom button class to be written but we could probably take most of the rendering and shading code from GTK+ and even re-use existing style properties so that themes are not broken (I am not 100% sure here but I think so). Downside: This button looks like it will pop up a menu. And it is not clear that there are actually two separate things you can click on. — Jannis Pohlmann 2011/05/29 00:47

• I like the position of the expander and the expander itself. The highlighting as a button should only happen when hovering the eject-icon, not the device-name since clicking doesn't really execute a button-like action.
  • I would vote for that too, it feels less cluttered on hover IMO. Instead, when hovering the label we could change the mouse cursor as when hovering a link, change the background color or font (make it bold?)… — Jérôme Guelfucci 2011/05/29 15:25
  • On second thought I'm really wondering whether we need highlighting for the nodes themselves, the eject button definitely needs something. But since the nodes aren't really like links (even though I agree you could argue the opposite here as well) I think the hand is misleading. To me they're more like folders and folders don't need/have much prelight. — Simon Steinbeiß 2011/05/30 01:35

GIMP source

• I tried to implement this using a tree view. It's a pain in particular if the rows and their action buttons are to be interacted with independently. It's barely doable. Example code is here: http://git.xfce.org/special-interest-groups/design/tree/thunar/shortcuts-pane/demo-code/tree-view — Jannis Pohlmann 2011/05/31 04:31

• This is an implementation using three expanders and a custom container widget for rendering a single row. The row and the action button can be focused/activated independently (even with a keyboard they are easy to navigate). All custom drawing is done based on primitives provided by GTK+, so that theming should not be an issue. The action button can switch between an eject icon, an animated spinner as a progress indicator and a cancel icon when the progress indicator is hovered with the mouse. Compared to the tree view idea it works much better and is easier to implement. Code is here: http://git.xfce.org/special-interest-groups/design/tree/thunar/shortcuts-pane/demo-code/custom-view — Jannis Pohlmann 2011/05/31 04:31

The following criteria were identified as necessary and/or desirable for the new design of the shortcuts pane. The IDs are prefixed with A for Appearance, B for Behavior and I for Implementation. The discussions about these criteria can be read in the page history.

The status cells are color coded:

• a white background means the feature is not implemented yet,
• a green background means the feature is supported,
• a orange background means the feature is being worked on,
• a grey background means the feature is partially working but is not developed any further.

• B20: Firstly, this would pollute the context-menu. Secondly (and more importantly) this is not a very good option for a context-menu, because you can only hide the item, not unhide it from there. I think in terms of consistency for the user (meaning: “Where do I change this or that behavior?”) one place to hide and unhide is better (e.g. the thunar preferences-dialog). Other stuff like making an item non-/persistent makes more sense, simply because the item doesn't disappear as a result of setting that option. — Simon Steinbeiß 2011/06/06 16:53
  • True, I removed it from the list (so B20 now refers to something else). — Jannis Pohlmann 2011/09/07 02:01

• We need to distinguish various types of files, mounts and volumes:
  • local (or regular) files that are not associated with a mount
  • remote files that are optionally associated with a mount (this is the case with remote bookmarks; as soon as they are mounted, a mount will be created and we need to attach it to the shortcut)
  • mounts that are not associated with a volume (this is the case with mounts of remote bookmarks, mounted archives and samba shares; mounts of remote bookmarks need to be attachd to remote bookmark shortcuts, others need to be displayed as a stand-alone shortcut either in the devices or network category)
  • mounts that are associated with a volume (these should be ignored)
  • volumes that have a mount and for which pressing eject should only unmount/eject that mount (these are USB sticks etc.)
  • volumes that have a mount and for which pressing eject should eject the entire device (these are CD drives etc.)

Source: http://www.bomahy.nl/hylke/blog/clutter-in-nautilus-sidebar/

• The mockup looks very similar to the design of Finder. It's clean and different items are easy to distinguish. I can see two problems with this design: 1. it might not scale very well (e.g. imagine you had ~10 devices like in the old screenshot) and 2. it has no eject buttons (I would assume those to appear as sub-buttons once an item is hovered but other ways are possible). — Jannis Pohlmann 2011/05/26 19:05

Source: http://derstandard.at/1291454133084/WebStandard-Update-GNOME-3-Die-naechste-Desktop-Generation-glaenzt-im-neuen-Look

Sources: http://osxhelp.com/customizing-the-finder-sidebar-in-os-x/ http://www.macwize.com/HOWTO/files/application_installation.html

• I really like the editing feature. We should have that. — Jannis Pohlmann 2011/05/27 01:09
  • Maybe it'd be enough to be able to show/hide categories, not each individual node (otherwise thunar would have to remember e.g. external devices as well in order to hide them again next time). — Simon Steinbeiß 2011/05/27 23:17
• Archives or iso-images make sense as part of the devices, if the feature lands in thunar, I guess this is how it should look/work — Simon Steinbeiß 2011/05/27 01:21

Source: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/11/nautilus-elementary-is-dead-marlin-file-browser/