From: <dg...@ta...> - 2000-12-18 19:37:35
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> In every other desktop-managing mechanism out there I have seen (including > Windows, MacOS, KDE, dfm, etc.), the desktop is a folder by itself, in which > you can drop and remove files and links. In ROX-Filer, on the contrary, the > pinboard is just pointers to files stored somewhere else. That's how Risc OS did it. Risc OS didn't store position information with each file. As a result, it could only display sorted views (of several different kinds) in folder windows. This would be pretty hopeless for the pinboard. As a result, the original pinboard design was never intended to be a proper folder view. It was supposed to be the same kind of thing as the Windows 3.0 Program Manager: a collection of shortcuts to documents or files on the hard drive. In order to implement it as a folder view, we'd need to add support for icon- position information. On Unix systems this is extremely hard, as there's no support for any file metadata. (See the recent discussion on cached image thumbnails.) You'd either have to use hidden files (in which case it wouldn't work on directories you couldn't write to) or a database somewhere (in which case you run into consistency problems). If you look at some of the other Unix file managers out there, you'll find that very few of them support this sort of thing. It's just too much effort. (Also, most Unix users don't want this sort of feature; I use ROX for managing my music collection, because it's really good at long filenames, but everything else I do on the command line. My backdrop is blank.) -- +- David Given ---------------McQ-+ "There is nothing in the world so | Work: dg...@ta... | dangerous --- and I mean *nothing* --- as a | Play: dg...@in... | children's story that happens to be true." +- http://wired.st-and.ac.uk/~dg -+ --- Master Li Kao, _The Bridge of Birds_ |