The Ideal File Manager
Let’s say I have a file on which I want to execute a certain instruction (e.g., “open with whatever program”).
I (and I believe most people) prefer to accomplish things in this order: Go to the file; then open it. It is also possible to run the program and then instruct the program to open the file, but I almost never do this.
Now, there are basically two interfaces that I use and that are really available: the command line and the graphical file browser.
The command line has some big advantages in terms of finely tuned instructions. If you were to use the script “engliSH” that I wrote–well, if I’d continued work on it, anyway–then it would be even more natural.1
The graphical file browser has a big advantage in terms of selecting which files will be the object of the commands.
Think about it in terms of explaining to another person what you want to happen. To describe what needs to be done, you want to use language. To describe the location of something, however, it is often easier to gesture or even make a little drawing.
So, the ideal file manager, in my opinion, would be graphical with a command line on the bottom. Without clicking anything, typing would allow you to enter commands (e.g., a bash shell). Clicking would let you change directories and select files, etc. Hitting enter would then execute the commands you entered on the selected files. It would combine “showing” and “telling” using the strong points of each.
Konqueror can actually be made to operate pretty closely to this, but there are extra clicks involved.
1 english was a “natural language” shell. Basically, it’s a python script that translates fairly natural language into bash commands.
An actual engliSH session could look like this:
$ list all files here
[ ... ]
$ now delete them
This code in the engliSH shell ends up getting translated as ls ./* and then rm -f ./*
If I hadn’t quit working on it, my goal was to get to the point of being able to use complex descriptions like “the text document I last edited” or “all the songs that start with the letter ‘a’” . Even getting the pronouns to work was pretty neat.
