Federico Mena-Quintero: Thu 2012/Oct/18

Icon view for GtkFileChooser

Almost two years ago, Simo Kivimäki started a branch for gtk+ to add an icon view for the file chooser. We had some action going on in github, and then I dropped the ball and left Simo's work lingering there. This fills me with shame, for it is excellent work.

Then, yesterday, Nekoyaho tauntedencouraged me to get off my lazy ass. He said, "Would you like to 'JFDI'...", and I mean, how could I decline, and how hard can it be, anyway?

I rebased Simo's old branch for GTK+ master, did a few fixes for obvious bugs, and pushed the result to the branch named bgo141154-filechooser-icon-view. This is very close to being merge-able to master. Some missing things:

• Something is wrong when you hit the "Create Folder" button. The "Type name of new folder" caption appears under the correct icon, but it's not in the editable entry. The icon being edited should be selected. Spacing between icons and captions is weird.

• There are some GWarnings when exiting testfilechooser.

• No thumbnails are read; it just uses generic icons.

• The combo box to select between icon or list view is functional but ugly. I think our graphic artists had some mockups for a pretty toggle.

Still, now that the code is alive again, these can be fixed easily. Patches are appreciated :)

Simo's work is also an excellent starting point for the refactoring that will lead the file chooser to having pluggable views. This for content selection in Gnome OS (API discussion). Since Simo already did the work of factoring out all the places in the code that deal with frobbing the treeview list vs. the icon list, adding pluggable views will be a lot easier than with the original code.

So, thank Simo Kivimäki for his excellent work on the file chooser, and let's get this done!