Contributor Adys

I really like gEdit, it's a simple app and abides by all gnome standards. Any changes in preferences are reflected in the editor.

I do wish however that ith ad more features. The first of which is code folding.

Plain and simple.

1)small tree browser in the left pane( like the one in windows explorer, its convenient for quickly browsing the hierarchy'). The tree like structure in the "detailed" view on the right pane is very close to what i am talking abt. but, it needs to be on the left side with smaller icons so that it can fit into a smaller left pane.

2) Tabbed browsing instead of opening multiple windows

3) responsiveness, nautilus needs to render much faster that it currently does. Since the file explorer is one of the most frequently used app, ppl get easy frustrated when it doesn't work as expected.

4) There should be an option to apply a view setting (icons,details,etc) system wide( for all folders in the system) , that is, not remembering view setting for each folder and using a global view setting.

5) Dragging an entity should make it transparent. If not done, this tends to cover up the entity on which you are dropping it on. If transparency is not achievable due to some limitation in X server, show only the outline while dragging.

6) The shorcuts in the left pane, when right clicked should have context menu similar to that of a normal folder.

I've installed Ubuntu for a number of friends and family. Whenever I go back to check on things a few months later, the desktop is littered with 'setup.exe' files, and I hear complaints that they "can't seem to install any programs!"

Of course, when I show them the "Add/Remove Programs" system, they happily download a zillion games and challenge me to Tux Racer contests.

When WINE is not installed, Ubuntu should have a default handler for Windows .exe files explaining that Windows software does not run on Ubuntu, and pointing them to Add/Remove Programs.

Perhaps something like "You have attempted to run PHOTOSHOP-SETUP.EXE, which is a Windows application. Ubuntu applications are available for installation from the Add/Remove Programs option in your Applications menu."

In addition, this feature could extract information about the EXE file and suggest equivalent Ubuntu applications. Most EXE files contain resources which indicate what they contain, as do most Installshield installers.

It would be pretty simple to have this system report names and md5sums of exe files being run to a web server, allowing Canonical to build a list of suggested alternatives for specific Windows applications.

This suggestion would certainly help eliminate confusion among new adopters, and would drive awareness of open source equivalents for Windows applications.

Now when you use the Human theme, you're stuck with brown.

You should be able to pick a color of your own likening so that you can choose blue, green, yellow, white, orange, black, gray, purple, teal, pink or whatever you like.

Check this awesome artwork that I made!
* http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/317/coloredthemeyz9.png
* http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/7682/colortheme2ls1.png
* Steel
* Rainbow


From idea #9139 (merged):

Currently the theming is all over the place and changing one place does not affect any other. Although that kind of tweakability is great, most users just want different default colors. (pink, blue, brown, black)

What we should be having:
A: wallpaper - changes every release
B: color-theme - human (easily configurable by user!)
C: splash-canvas - human (we need to create this)
D: gtk-engine - clearlooks with B as default colors
E: kde-engine - oxygen with B as default colors
F: icon-theme - tango with color-filter using B

From these we could generate:

[....]

One awesome feature of nautilus is that you may zoom in or out to change the size of the icons. Currently there are 3 buttons to control the zoom: zoom out, a percentage of your zoom level (resets when clicked), and a zoom in.

Adding a slider bar that adjusts the zoom level would add some polish and make it easier to adjust. This could be similar to the zoom in Microsoft office 2007 as show in this pic:
http://thenewpaperclip.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/WindowsLiveWriter/WhatHap penedtotheFileMenu_CA69/zoomlayout51.png

It's very annoying to try to find the binary file in Firefox/Mozilla's "Download" -> "Open With" -> "Other...(Select Application)" dialog. When you're compiling Mozilla for X11, shouldn't they detect the menu system?

In icon view, things sometimes get a little bit cluttered and confusing in nautilus. I thought it would be helpful to (optionally) visually separate files and folders to make navigation easier.

Example image: http://www.gnome-look.org/CONTENT/content-pre1/62271-1.png

Source: Gnome-look.org
Author: mockup

Link: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=62271&forumpage=0

Nautilus does its job as a light file manager. However, as Gnome's default file manager, I think it could use a lot more love than what it is given. This could include:

- Tabbed browsing! Most browsers today support tabbed browsing, but still few file managers. This doesn't really make sense now does it?
- Better remote connection/sftp handling. The current one is AWFUL. Slow, sluggish, buggy. Take example on Konqueror!
- SVN integration has been waved at. I find it a cool idea, even if only as a plugin.
- Speaking of plugins... those also need some love. How many plugins are there for Nautilus? Most users don't even know Nautilus can be enhanced.
- File tooltips - once again, take example on Konqueror / Windows explorer.

Edit: A few more ideas around Brainstorm:
- Separation of files and folders
- Slider bar for zoom
- A better icon management
- The ability to explode folders

Those are just a handful of ideas. My main concern is Nautilus is being underdeveloped, and the solid alternative is only non-Gnome (Konqueror).


If you liked this idea, check out my other ideas.

In Nautilus (Gnome default file manager), right clicking a file and selecting "Open with... other application" brings up a dialog with the following issues:

1. The application list is not consistent with other application menus, e.g. the one on the panel

2. Some applications are not listed (these apps are added to the other menus though)

3. The non-modifiable behaviour is to set the "other application" as the default for that file type so an option to "use this as the default application for this file type" should be added

Example for #3:
- I have a PDF file
- I want to open it with PDFedit
- It is not in the open with menu
- Select it through open with other application
- It now becomes the default however I still want evince to be the default PDF viewer
- I have to repeat the above to open with evince to make that the default again

Archives are opening in applications like File Roller. Why? When you thing about you realize that archive is nothing less than special type of folder (and folder is special type of file with defined structure dependent on filesystem). But archives can be presented as compressed folders and opens in same windows as regular folders. Why do we need to confuse user with different windows?

Working with archives will be easy as in Midnight Commander or in Total Commander or in Windows XP. And if it will be implemented like VFS (zip://path/archive.zip/subdirectory/file) or as kernel driver it will be easier due to be transparent to any application.

Update: If gvfs is not possible, mounting the archive could be another possible way to implement this.

Archive managers should be used only for creating archives with non common attributes, e.g. encrypted, splitted to multiple volumes (to fit DVD, CD, ZIP drive, Floppy)...

Note: When you try to drag big file out from the archive from File Roller you need to wait to fully uncompress file before releasing mouse button (once it started to uncompress it). It's bad and very annoying.

(Idea copied from: http://chabada.sk/better-desktop/)

Phoenix Mars Mission from NASA created a Mars Weather Widget available for Windows and Mac:

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/screen.php

But not for Linux. It would be nice having a extraterrestrial location in Weather Applet options and/or to adapt NASA's Widget to Ubuntu.

Right now we have three package managers: gnome-app-install, Synaptic, and the .deb installer.

Why can't these be one application?

give gnome-app-install a backend to handle .deb files, or give it an administrative mode where it has all the power tools that synaptic has. Start somewhere. But end with one spot to manage every application installed on my system, no matter how it got there.

As a side note, another idea was automated install of tarballs. I know this will never be a perfect system because not all tarballs use the generic install method. But maybe push for some way to seperate and deal with those who do use the generic method.

There should be absolutely no reason for anyone to say that its easier to install, manage, and update apps on any other platform than Linux!

Currently, Net and USB install can be a difficult process for the new user, who has to research many sites for instructions.

It would be great if a user could:
- Download a small file from any public computer
- Run it to create a bootable USB flash net-installer
- Boot from the USB flash on most PCs

The USB flash boots to curses (text) based menu that can:
- Net install Ubuntu to HD, from repository or torrent
- Update GRUB if their HD boot partition was resized
- Restore a Windows XP
- Perform other repairs
- Create a ramdrive with bash shell, text editor, and apt-get individual packages. (i.e. borrow a PC, plug in USB w/ Ubuntu portable image, and apt-get an ad-hoc server or development machine to RAM, with the home directory on the USB flash)

Older machines would have a simple floppy/CD to mount and boot the USB flash image, but only the USB image would need to be replaced with newer versions.

Firefox extensions are a pain to maintain in the repositories, and very often lag behind when updating them. They should be removed as they are EXTREMELY easy to install from Firefox itself.

Ubufox may be an exception due to its nature though.


If you liked this idea, check out my other ideas.

It would be useful to have filters so that you can see files only of a certain type e.g. only PDF files in a certain folder. I know you can order files by type but if the folder is big it will take some time to go through all the types.

Please show the number of ideas in each category, in parenthesis. For example:

Ideas being worked upon (123)
Implemented ideas (57)
Accessibility (145)
Brainstorm (456)

etc.

It should also show how many ideas there are in total somewhere....

Thanks

As of now, if one wants to add/edit a menu item, one has to right-click on the gnome menu title bar, select to edit the menu, and then navigate through another hierarchy. It would be much simpler to add an option to "edit this item" or "add a new menu item" through right-click when you are navigating the menu normally.

edit: Also moving items in menu just by drag and drop.

We need to clean up the /home directory for the user from the cluttered hidden .configuration files: you go into /home/yourusername/ and reveal the hidden files. All you see is tons of junk, and when you need to find one, it is a total nightmare. If you want to backup your home directory, rummage through all the config directories created by the hundreds of applications and delete their temp files and caches prior to the backup. The dozens of .hidden files creates usability problems for everyone, power users and newbies.

Ubuntu should make a serious effort to work with upstream providers in an effort to get all major ubuntu applications to follow the freedesktop.org standard. That is to put all these files into ~/.config and all temp/cache directories under ~/.cache. I propose that this be done by setting two goals:

1) Short term goal: Start with the most common default applications. work on those that cause the most clutter.

2) Long term goal: Implement XGD on the rest of the apps. Start with the popular add on software most people use, and then on from there.

specification below (freedesktop.org):

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME defines the base directory relative to which user specific configuration files should be stored. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, a default equal to $HOME/.config should be used.

$XDG_CACHE_HOME defines the base directory relative to which user specific non-essential data files should be stored. If $XDG_CACHE_HOME is either not set or empty, a default equal to $HOME/.cache should be used.

http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html

[....]

I recently wanted to get more involved in the development of my favourite open source projects (including Xubuntu). But often I found the only way to get involved was a mailing list. When I signed up for the mailing lists I was surprised just how clunky and unintuitive they were compared to internet forums, and how little functionality they had. Plus there is something about communicating directly via email like that which is very intimidating to a new user.

In this day and age of several open source forum/messageboard systems with features coming out of their ears, all with email subscription controls and probably RSS feeds too, why are developers still using the antiquated, frankly crappy mailing lists of old?

It seems like its such a traditional,ingrained thing to use mailing lists if you are an open source developer that they all keep using them even when there are better solutions out there.

I would like to see more projects making use of more modern, sophisticated tools. I am talking about forums here but perhaps it could be something else all together, I'm not really up on what is out there for collaborations and communication, but whatever you use it certainly doesn't need to be a mailing list with it's ugly text email with zero functionality besides getting your inbox filled with conversations better suited to a forum thread.

If it sounds like I am just moaning then you are missing the point, that if you had an attractive, easy to use forum with different catagories for different suggestions and development topics then you would get sooooo many more people joining in.

Ditch mailing lists, they suck!

This is an answer alternative to idea #8313, please don't mark as duplicate.

I think there should be a small template manager. The contextual menu would contain:

Empty file
(Templates...)
----------
Modify template list

Modifying the template list would fire up a sort of stripped-down version of Alacarte to manage templates.
- A template should have a ready-to-use extension, name, and optionally some content.
- Order of templates and separators in the menu should be easy to change (like in Alacarte)
- The path to the template folder should be easy to change (I might not want to use the default one, use one shared with other users or use a localized version...)
- Order of files should be manageable in there aswell (defaulting to alphabetical order if not precised - eg files hard-added in the templates folder)
- The manager should probably be a separated package to Nautilus, front-end to simple config files.


If you liked this idea, check out my other ideas.