On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 10:55:21PM +0000, Philip Stubbs wrote:

How do I set the default mode for the file dialog. I have to expand the dialog every time I use it, and it is getting a little annoying.

I am using Gimp 2.2.4 on Windows XP.

there is no way (to the best of my knowledge) to do this at this time.

this fileselector seems to be designed to perfectly annoy everyone in one way or another and on this matter is working very very well.

carol

Hi,

Philip Stubbs writes:

How do I set the default mode for the file dialog. I have to expand the dialog every time I use it, and it is getting a little annoying.

I'd like to know why you have to expand it every time you use it. If you can show that this is indeed needed, then we would have to do something about it. The collapsed parts of the dialog are supposed to be only rarely used.

Sven

* Sven Neumann :

Hi,

Philip Stubbs writes:

How do I set the default mode for the file dialog. I have to expand the dialog every time I use it, and it is getting a little annoying.

I'd like to know why you have to expand it every time you use it. If you can show that this is indeed needed, then we would have to do something about it. The collapsed parts of the dialog are supposed to be only rarely used.

I'm not Philip, but:
I keep original photos in a separate directory tree. After modifying them with gimp, they're saved in a folder of my choice. Which happens to be never the one I open image from (and which is suggested in save-dialog), so it's wrong every single time. It could be 'easily' remedied by showing some kind of a list with 'favourite' targets. It does have that, but it's collapsed along with dirtree. It would be immensely more useful if some of those favourites would be program-specific (in this case, The GIMP).

Slightly OT: I'd very much like some kind of drag'n'drop saving that could work by dragging image to folder on desktop. (Dragging 'Active image' preview from toolbox could do the trick?).

Hi,

Pasi Savolainen writes:

I'm not Philip, but:
I keep original photos in a separate directory tree. After modifying them with gimp, they're saved in a folder of my choice. Which happens to be never the one I open image from (and which is suggested in save-dialog), so it's wrong every single time. It could be 'easily' remedied by showing some kind of a list with 'favourite' targets. It does have that, but it's collapsed along with dirtree. It would be immensely more useful if some of those favourites would be program-specific (in this case, The GIMP).

The list of favorites is in the combo-box you get in the uncollapsed part of the save file-chooser. You can add your favorite directories there by opening the folder view and dragging your favorite image folders to the left pane.

We could think about adding a way to add gimp-specific favorites there. That would however preferably be handled by the GTK+ widget.

I'd very much like some kind of drag'n'drop saving that could work by dragging image to folder on desktop. (Dragging 'Active image' preview from toolbox could do the trick?).

There used to be a spec proposing a DND enhancement called Direct Save or XDS. I have not been able to locate that again but this is something that the file manager handling the desktop would have to implement. If there is a widely adopted standard for this, we will add support for it.

Sven

(Regarding needing to expand the Save As dialog to show directories:)

Pasi Savolainen writes:

I keep original photos in a separate directory tree. After modifying them with gimp, they're saved in a folder of my choice. Which happens to be never the one I open image from (and which is suggested in save-dialog), so it's wrong every single time.

I'm in the same situation as Pasi. I often open an image wherever it originally lives, then after I make a change, save to to whatever working directory I'm using. I guess a better model now would be to go to a shell and cp the file to the new location before touching it with gimp, but with 2.0 and 1.x it was no problem, so I got in the habit of staying within gimp for the whole job.

It could be 'easily' remedied by showing some kind of a list with 'favourite' targets. It does have that, but it's collapsed along with

"Favorites" or "Bookmarks" that were always visible would help some of the time, but not all of the time: I can't bookmark every directory where I ever save images, so I tend to bookmark the top of a hierarchy, then navigate down within that hierarchy. Navigating down is hard in this dialog (it's easy if directory names are unique, but not if there are any name conflicts) and usually I end up just typing the whole subdirectory path and hoping I don't mistype.

Naming conflicts in files are another reason I frequently expand the dialog. I often save successive images to similar names. For instance, I might have lesson6-step1.jpg, lesson6-step2.jpg, lesson7-step1, etc. The autocomplete in the dialog will only complete up up to the first conflict, and after that, my choices are: - type out the whole "6-step2.jpg" part (with the old dialog, I could have typed 6 and not had to type "-step.jpg"); - arrow down through the list until I get to a file with a similar name (and then hit return, reminding myself that return in this case doesn't actually save to the name I chose, only loads that name into the text field and I'll still be able to edit it; I have a hard time making myself hit return in a save as dialog when I'm pointed at a file that already exists and I don't want to overwrite); or
- expand the dialog, scroll down, and click on one of the existing filenames so that I can edit it.

The last frequently ends up being easiest -- though it's still harder than autocomplete with the old dialog, since it requires the mouse.

...Akkana

On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 01:11:16AM +0100, Sven Neumann wrote:

There used to be a spec proposing a DND enhancement called Direct Save or XDS. I have not been able to locate that again but this is something that the file manager handling the desktop would have to implement. If there is a widely adopted standard for this, we will add support for it.

Take a look at the ROX people. They were the ones pushing Direct Save. Those apps they have gotten to work wonderfully.

http://rox.sf.net

Jeff

Hi,

Akkana Peck writes:

Naming conflicts in files are another reason I frequently expand the dialog. I often save successive images to similar names. For instance, I might have lesson6-step1.jpg, lesson6-step2.jpg, lesson7-step1, etc. The autocomplete in the dialog will only complete up up to the first conflict, and after that, my choices are: - type out the whole "6-step2.jpg" part (with the old dialog, I could have typed 6 and not had to type "-step.jpg"); - arrow down through the list until I get to a file with a similar name (and then hit return, reminding myself that return in this case doesn't actually save to the name I chose, only loads that name into the text field and I'll still be able to edit it; I have a hard time making myself hit return in a save as dialog when I'm pointed at a file that already exists and I don't want to overwrite); or
- expand the dialog, scroll down, and click on one of the existing filenames so that I can edit it.

You missed the obvious choice:

- hit the Tab key to autocomplete (just like in the old dialog)

Sven

Hi,

Akkana Peck writes:

"Favorites" or "Bookmarks" that were always visible would help some of the time, but not all of the time: I can't bookmark every directory where I ever save images, so I tend to bookmark the top of a hierarchy, then navigate down within that hierarchy. Navigating down is hard in this dialog (it's easy if directory names are unique, but not if there are any name conflicts) and usually I end up just typing the whole subdirectory path and hoping I don't mistype.

A list of last-used directories would probably help to solve your problem. Did you suggest this as an enhancement request for GTK+ yet?

Sven

Hi,

Jeffrey Brent McBeth writes:

Take a look at the ROX people. They were the ones pushing Direct Save.

Thanks. That did at least allow me to locate the spec again:

http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xds/ http://rox.sourceforge.net/xds.html

Even though this page claims that GTK+ and KDE would support this protocol, to my knowledge this is not the case. I might be wrong but if I am not, then implementing XDS in GIMP doesn't make much sense since for the waste majority of our users, there will be nothing to drag the files to.

Sven

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Pasi Savolainen wrote:

Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 23:22:00 +0000 (UTC) From: Pasi Savolainen
To: gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu Subject: [Gimp-user] Re: Default mode for file dialog

Slightly OT:
I'd very much like some kind of drag'n'drop saving that could work by dragging image to folder on desktop. (Dragging 'Active image' preview from toolbox could do the trick?).

The suggestion going round has been that the icon included in the window decoration would become a drag target and dragging it to the desktop would save it. This was just one idea put forward, I dont know if there is even a bug report for it yet and (although I'm only guessing) I wouldn't expect it to be available all that soon.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

Hi,

Sven Neumann writes:

Thanks. That did at least allow me to locate the spec again:

http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xds/ http://rox.sourceforge.net/xds.html

Even though this page claims that GTK+ and KDE would support this protocol, to my knowledge this is not the case. I might be wrong but if I am not, then implementing XDS in GIMP doesn't make much sense since for the waste majority of our users, there will be nothing to drag the files to.

Well, for the fun of it, I've added XDS support to GIMP now. Anyone who's using ROX or any other XDS capable desktop / file manager, might want to try latest CVS and give feedback.

Perhaps if the nautilus and konqueror developers get to know of this change in GIMP, they will consider to add support for XDS as well...

Sven

Sven Neumann writes:

Naming conflicts in files are another reason I frequently expand the dialog. I often save successive images to similar names. For instance, I might have lesson6-step1.jpg, lesson6-step2.jpg, lesson7-step1, etc. The autocomplete in the dialog will only complete up up to the first conflict, and after that, my choices are:

[ ... ]

You missed the obvious choice:

- hit the Tab key to autocomplete (just like in the old dialog)

I might be missing something. When should I hit the tab key? For instance, if I have a bunch of existing files called gimptxt-[0-7].jpg and I want to save this one as gimptxt-8.jpg. I type gim, and the dropdown pops up. If I hit tab now, nothing different happens -- the dropdown disappears for a second then comes back, and nothing new is added to the filename in the text field.

Sven Neumann writes:

A list of last-used directories would probably help to solve your problem. Did you suggest this as an enhancement request for GTK+ yet?

I haven't, because it would still be an awkward solution. I'd have to do the same thing I described for similar filenames: select a last-used directory with a similar name, hit return, then edit the name to get the name of the new directory. And if the list was in most-recently-used order, which would make sense from a design standpoint, that would actually make it more difficult for my most common usage: I'd probably have a last-used list that was out of order (lesson9, then lesson8, then lesson10, then lesson6) which would be awkward to read and navigate.

If you added a last-used list, I'd probably use it sometimes; but most of the time I'd probably just end up typing the whole filename rather than switching to the mouse to choose the directory, then back to the keyboard to edit the directory and finish typing the filename.

...Akkana

Hi,

Alan Horkan writes:

The suggestion going round has been that the icon included in the window decoration would become a drag target and dragging it to the desktop would save it.

The icon in the window decoration is not under control by the application. Well, the application can ask the window manager to use a certain icon but it doesn't get access to the icon itself. There is definitely no way to use it as a DND source or target.

As of today, the CVS version of GIMP allows you to save by dragging out of the Images dialog or from the image preview in the toolbox. This requires a file-manager supporting XDS. So far I have only found rox-filer to support this feature.

Sven

Hi,

Philip Stubbs writes:

Maybe I am using it wrong, but I only use gimp on ocasions. However, when I do, I am normally working in a number of different directories, and they can change each time I use the gimp, so a default list does not help.

Why not temporarily add those directories to the list of bookmarks? Probably less effort than looking for the directories over and over again.

Also, I need to generate different formats, so I find the file type part usefull.

You are aware that you just need to enter the file extension? There's really no need to use the file type list except for some almost pathological use cases.

Sven

Hi,

Akkana Peck writes:

I might be missing something. When should I hit the tab key?

For instance, if I have a bunch of existing files called gimptxt-[0-7].jpg and I want to save this one as gimptxt-8.jpg. I type gim, and the dropdown pops up. If I hit tab now, nothing different happens -- the dropdown disappears for a second then comes back, and nothing new is added to the filename in the text field.

Hmm, I discussed this with Federico a while ago and he showed me how to do it. Yesterday before writing this mail, I tested it and it worked correctly. But it appears that I tested this in the Ctrl-L dialog of the Open dialog. It works correctly there, but I can't get that behaviour in the Save dialog right now. Interesting...

Sven

Hi,

I had a look at the source and the file entry does indeed behave differently whether it is in Open or Save mode. After thinking about it a little, this even makes sense. If the entry would complete like it does in the Open dialog, it would be hard to enter filenames that match the first few chars of existing ones. Not sure if there's a way to improve this situation. You should discuss this with Federico.

Sven

On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 15:30:18 +0100, Sven Neumann wrote:

Sven Neumann writes:

Thanks. That did at least allow me to locate the spec again:

http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xds/ http://rox.sourceforge.net/xds.html

[...]

Well, for the fun of it, I've added XDS support to GIMP now. Anyone who's using ROX or any other XDS capable desktop / file manager, might want to try latest CVS and give feedback.

Perhaps if the nautilus and konqueror developers get to know of this change in GIMP, they will consider to add support for XDS as well...

Great! Would it be possible to put the preview in the Save dialog, though, next to the name entry? It's not possible to set the name when dragging from the toolbox, so everything ends up being called 'Untitled' :-(

Thanks,

Hi,

Thomas Leonard writes:

Great! Would it be possible to put the preview in the Save dialog, though, next to the name entry? It's not possible to set the name when dragging from the toolbox, so everything ends up being called 'Untitled' :-(

That is something that only the GTK+ developers can do.

Sven

Hi,

Thomas Leonard writes:

It's not possible to set the name when dragging from the toolbox, so everything ends up being called 'Untitled' :-(

Actually this is something that surprised me about XDS. It doesn't specify how to handle untitled documents. I was expecting that if I don't set a leafname as content of the "XdndDirectSave0" property, that the file-manager I am dragging the image to would ask me for the filename. I had it implemented that way first but rox-filer gave me an error message:

XdndDirectSave0 target provided, but the atom XdndDirectSave0 (type text/plain) did not contain a leafname

I have thus changed the XDS code in GIMP to always provide a leafname, using "Untitled.xcf" if no other name has been set.

The XDS spec could need a few changes, clarifications. It would be nice if the empty leafname would be accepted and it would also be nice if the spec was more clear about the filename encoding.

Sven

Hi,

Philip Stubbs writes:

However, for me, it would make sense to have the directory selector expanded each time I open the file dialog. This will save me one click each time :-)

IMHO it would be a lot more useful if, instead of being always opened, the directory browser would get the keyboard focus if it is opened using the Alt-B mnemonic. That would help saving a few more clicks than what we could achieve by opening the directory browser by default.

Sven