Contributor frogitts

In that other operating system, it was really convenient to be able to sort my "Downloads" folder by the date downloaded. This is not possible in Nautilus, and really bugs me. Now I have to go back to Firefox, look at the file name, and then go back to my "Downloads" folder to find the name of the file, rather than just having the newest download appear at the top of the window.

I'm pretty sure I saw this idea somewhere else, but I don't think it was here, so sorry if this is a duplicate.

I like the breadcrumbs in Nautilus, but I think they would be even better if each one was a dropdown list containing all the other folders in that subfolder. So when I'm at /home/Ted/Pictures/2008/May and I want to go to /home/Ted/Videos, all I have to do is click on the "Pictures" breadcrumb, scroll down the list, and click on "Videos".

Like this, but prettier :): http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/image47.png

I think that somewhere (either in a right cick menu on the desktop or in Nautilus preferences) there should be an option to hide all desktop icons. This seems like it would be an easy extra little button, particularly if it were to be added to Nautilus' preferences. The functionality is available in gconf via Apps > Nautilus >Preferences > show_desktop.

This would be in addition to ideas such as this: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5316/

Please note that I'm not sure if this idea would cause damage to some people's systems if applied, I just know it doesn't seem to hurt mine.

I'm having a heck of a time with my ntfs external hard drive because a program I have randomly removes it without unmounting and remounts it. This causes problems because it can't remount to its normal mountpoint, and I have programs installed on the drive that then cannot function because its path has changed (in my case, from /media/ExternalHD to /media/sdc1).

I think we could fix this by tracking these devices by UUIDs, not by a relative variable. As far as I know, the UUID doesn't change, though I could be wrong (in this case, track it by characteristics, like pysdm claims to be able to do but can't, at least in my case).

This would allow a much easier and fool-proof way(I would think) to keep track of an external hard drive. It would also allow for the future possibility of Ubuntu detecting when the specified device has been removed with files still waiting to be written to it, storing that data, and writing it to the drive the next time it appears without fear of corrupting the data of whatever unsuspecting drive popped into that slot later.

Also, this could allow Ubuntu to fix my problem - that once a drive has been unplugged, it cannot be mounted to the same mountpoint until a sudo umount has been executed on the previous /dev entry and the device has been unplugged, plugged back in, and remounted. My ideal would be that when my device accidentally gets unplugged, all I would have to do is plug it back in - Ubuntu would detect the UUID, notify me that it has to "unmount the device /dev/sdb1 with mountpoint /media/ExternalHD so that device with UUID ############# can be mounted at /dev/sdb1 with mountpoint /media/ExternalHD. I would see this, recognize that it's attempting to remove the ghost drive to mount the real drive, click "OK", and it would do "sudo umount /dev/sdb1", assign my drive to /dev/sdb1, and then do "sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /media/ExternalHD". Note that, in accordance with UUIDs applying to ntfs drives, this would only affect ntfs drives, thus the ntfs option can be included in that last sudo command.

Sorry if that was long and boring. Simply put: I want Ubuntu to always mount my hard drive at the same place, regardless of how I or my programs abuse it.

[....]

Background:
I like the idea of drawers for the gnome-panel (except for their slow and buggy nature). I think that something like that should also be available to power-users for the Places Menu.

There is, in fact, something like this already in place: the Recent Documents folder on the Places Menu. I think you should be able to make custom folders, like the recent documents folder, that have some of the contents visible on a side menu.

However, the Recent Documents folder lacks one function I would want for drawers in the Places Menu: clickability. If you click on the words "Recent Documents", nothing happens.
/Background


So with all of that background out of the way, here's my idea:

A Drawer option for the Places Menu with customizable contents and clickability.

Here's what you'd be able to do with that:

Let's say I make a drawer out of my "Documents" folder in the Places menu.

1) I right click on the Documents drawer in Places. I choose "Turn into Drawer" (or whatever). I then check the boxes next to "Pictures" and "Music", all of which are subfolders of "Documents". I leave the "Videos" folder unchecked because I don't want it to show up in the drawer.

2) I close the dialog. Now an arrow appears next to "Documents" in the places menu. If I click on "Documents" it still opens the Documents folder. No change in functionality there. However, if I leave my mouse there for half a second, the drawer pops up with the selected files listed. I can click on them to open them.

3) Theoretically, I could right-click on one of the folders in the drawer and turn it into a drawer as well.

[....]

I think an option should be added to the desktop right-click menu to clean up icons automatically. This would stop me from having to click the "Clean up by Name" option every single time something on my desktop changes.

This would be in addition to, not instead of, some of the improvements mentioned in ideas like these:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/2650/
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5333/
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/4513/