This side panel is pretty much useless if one doesn’t have any starred folder/file, especially so when you can just bookmark the folders you want.
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I think showing it even when empty greatly adds to its discoverability, otherwise people might not realize the functionality exists.
A better solution to me, would be If it were to become a normal bookmark that can just be removed.
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But it’s still available in the context menu for every folder and file, so it can still be found easily. Meanwhile, I don’t know what should happen to the starred property of files if you remove it from the sidebar.
Hi. Thanks for the idea.
I understand that you don’t use it so it’s not useful for you to have it there.
Hiding it when empty seems like a simple solution at first glance. On a closer look, other factors make it much less favorable.
- It hurts discoverability.
- It impedes the ability to add items by drag-and-drop into Starred.
- Starred being empty at a given moment doesn’t imply the user doesn’t use the feature: it may just happen the user has recently removed the all starred files, but may soon add more!
Conversely, keeping Starred in the sidebar even while empty doesn’t have any downside.
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The feature is already present on pretty much every context menu within Nautilus, so I don’t think it being present or not in the sidebar would hurt discoverability that much.
Honestly, I didn’t know about the drag-and-drop functionality, which is pretty nice, but still relatively useless to me when compared to the alternative of plain bookmarks.
About the last use case, it seems too transient to be taken into consideration IMO, but I can see how it could be relevant to some users.
I use GNOME on a laptop without an external monitor, so I don’t have much screen space available, and I like to hide/disable functions I don’t use. The downside to Starred is that I have to scroll to access my. bookmarks, even when they are as few as three.
I’ve seen some threads explaining that you have to pretty much recompile nautilus to hide this feature, which I think is a bit overboard when it could just be hidden when unused.
I understand that the problems explainedabove don’t apply to you personally, and I hope you also understand we have to find a balance between very different needs. And configuration is always a last resort that has very heavy costs for maintenance and testing.
Regarding the need to scrol to find your bookmarks, I am happy to tell you we are aware of this issue and our designers have come up with a few solutions to reduce the number of non-removable entries in the sidebar. Things like the Music or Videos folders shall become regular bookmarks that users can add or remove according to their needs.
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I see, that’s good news!
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