I’ve been prototyping a Miller Columns view for Nautilus (the classic “browse folders as a horizontal cascade of columns” layout, à la the macOS Finder column view and the old Nautilus spatial-ish browsing, which I miss ).
The work-in-progress branch currently supports:
Navigating a directory hierarchy across horizontally-scrolling columns
File preview in a trailing column, with cross-column activation
Per-column drag-to-resize
Integration with the existing back/forward navigation history
It builds on Nautilus’s existing directory-loading and window-slot infrastructure rather than bolting on a separate model.
I’d love feedback from the team on:
Whether there’s appetite for this as a first-class view alongside grid/list
The right architectural approach for integrating a new view type
Any UX/design considerations I should be aware of before taking it further
Happy to share the branch and screenshots. Thanks!
Miller columns view was requested many times before by users, and there was some buy in from a previous maintainer, but got pushed back to due to major refactoring of view and lack of manpower. The main issue is that it is a relatively complex view, and therefore needs design and substantial amount of work in order to be state acceptable for maintainers.
See these links for history:
The first step is to create a design issue (work item) in the design team group, where we define the usecases, start the ideation, and making mockups, including visual design and user interaction. This is done while taking in mind many GNOME design resources, the most important of which is GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. After we have a satisfactory design, we can move over to the Files repository to discuss code architecture and implementation details. From there, we can start writing and reviewing code, testing, etc.
Understood, I will start the process as a work item. I do have a working prototype (attaching screenshot) which I’ve attempted to make as close to what long-time users of Miller view expect.
The open design questions I know about are:
narrow-width/adaptive/mobile behavior (fallback to list view?)
reconciling the traditional Miller single-click traversal with the Gnome click-policy preference — feedback welcome
feedback on the file/preview panel, right now it’s a simplified rip-off of Finder, but I think we have the opportunity to make it better and more Gnome-like
).