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Idea #21125: Make gvfs more usable

Written by benpicco the 20 Aug 09 at 12:47. Related project: Gnome. Status: New
Rationale
Gvfs is a great system - it gives easy acces to network shares, iso files, Bluetooth shares, etc. But the way it's currently offered to the user, you have to access it via e.g. smb://server/share (for samba shares) - only some gnome applications can use this and it's totaly worthless on the terminal. So I often endet up mounting the gvfs share manually again, just to operate tools that can't hanlde this kind of adress or browse it with the terminal. However, it has not to be that difficult. In fact, all those gvfs shares get mounted to "~/.gvfs/share at server" anyway, but this is hidden from the user.
Tags: files gvfs hidden

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Solution #1: Don't hide gvfs shares
Written by benpicco the 20 Aug 09 at 12:47.
Just remove the . in front of the gvfs folder and give it a fancy name. Make it clear to the user that their share got mounted to this folder so they can really acces it like an ordinary folder on the local file system.

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Comments
Lachu wrote on the 21 Aug 09 at 13:38
I can't understand why GNOME/KDE(GVFS/KIO) gives url instead of path.

This post is not topic related, but maybe somebudy gives me answer?

Ssdg wrote on the 21 Aug 09 at 14:44
Because it tells you what you access and not how you access it.
For example, when you watch TV, you say you look at the news channel (using cable, satellite or an ISP's services), you never tell which network you use, you just look at the news channel.

The mount point is the way you access it, the URL is the channel's name.

mikaelstaldal wrote on the 21 Aug 09 at 16:03
Perhaps GVFS and FUSE should be better integrated.

dino wrote on the 21 Aug 09 at 19:09
@mikaelstaldal
gvfs does have a fuse mount pounts (that what ~/.gvfs is). How would they "integrate" into each other?

coolen wrote on the 24 Aug 09 at 01:48
The fuse mount points come in very handy. I use them for banshee, from the terminal...everywhere that GVFS is not used.

Why hide them? In fact, make them as visible as possible. Put them in an appropriately named folder and then bookmark that folder.

It's a drag having to wade through all the hidden folders in my home directory to find the shares, and I highly doubt most users, particularly new ones, know where to look, or even that they exist.

mikaelstaldal wrote on the 24 Aug 09 at 13:25
Why do GVFS exist at all? Why not just have a GNOME frontend to FUSE?

slashdotaccount wrote on the 3 Sep 09 at 09:23
Good idea where both GUI- and TTY-users will benefit from!

Pierre Chef wrote on the 11 Sep 09 at 10:59
Last day i mounted an other PC via sftp with a nautilus bookmark, and i was unable to find where it was mounted (nothing in ~/.gvfs/), so i couldn't copy a file via command line.

Mista2 wrote on the 24 May 10 at 09:52
Mounting drives is still one of the gems in OS X. Volumes appear as Icons like they do in Gnome, and in the shortcut bar in the file browser, but there are many linux apps that just fail to see these mounted drives. In OS X the mounted volumes also show up in /Volumes. It took me ages to find the similar mount point in ~/.gvfs - Not exactly an easy to find folder for a new user.
I simply link to the folder in my home folder, creating a folder ~/Network.
Mounted network shares now show up here and can be accessed easily by all apps.


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