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Symbolic Folders - Icons for a better experience

 

here's 2 mockups of how a properly organized filesystem can look.
perhaps i should have left the labels on the items in the first mockup,
since the icons i chose are not quite optimal...

I don't see an immediate problem of having a hierarchical filesystem exposed
onto the user, it's the chaotic way linux lays down it's system folders,
unfriendly (i.e. not human-readable) and totally archaic in naming.

As old as this problem might be, its solutions are perhaps even older:
we can use symlinks and .hidden as suggested before, gvfs, which i can't say
much about, seems to be a useful layer of software above all these geeky
system folders, too, all these tools are available to design an appearance
of what currently is unacceptable for presentation to the user.

Simply hiding the entire root filesystem is not a solution of scale.

I would personally love to see purposeful folders when i look at the
filesystem.

/var/log doesn't mean anything to me, if i look at it in Nautilus. Give it a
phracking thumbnail, some stock icon that works with a "logging" metaphor,
we want this!

/usr/bin , /usr/share/, whatever, what have you, you name it, the way the
system folders are organized in linux is perhaps something many people have
learnt to accept, but it is far from usable. Lets think about putting a
shell over these things, before escape from this chaos into a flat
filesystem immediately.. i think we still have some advantages to benefit
from, if we only clean up, label, mask and sort (hide) the hierarchical FS
we currently have.

anybody?

Attachment: symbolic folders.png
Description: PNG image

Attachment: symbolic folders - root.png
Description: PNG image


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