The anti-blog

Nautilus made great progress in last years but it still is not very useful to have a global view of the global filesystem structure.

I have hundred of folders in my home tree and I need to keep a hierarchical structure to organize them. I tried the spatial browser mode, but it is quite unusable because I cannot visualize the structure with more than one level. And the default tree view in Nautilus wastes a lot of space! I think that it would be great to have alternative views like the "bracket view" that I propose here. It is just a mock-up with no actual code. I'd be glad if the community finds useful some of those ideas and someone implements them ;)

The key ideas in this proposal are the following:

• the tree structure is represented like a tree (with visual elements such as lines and brackets that makes easier to identify the hierarchy)
• a tree level that has too many elements is partially represented, with a small scroll-bar next to the bracket
• the scroll-bar is represented on the left, making possible to connect lines from selected elements to new tree levels (note that it would be ugly in the other way)
• the last level can be represented as other nautilus views (detailed list, etc.)

Note that this representation should be as compact as the one in Finder for Mac OS X, and even more visual. Maybe it can be used as a work-around to the multiple patents that Apple filed for its interface (more info here).

Any comment, suggestion or ideas for alternative mock-ups (or eye-candy!) is welcome.