[ILUG] Inefficiency of graphical file browsers

[P at draigBrady.com]

Tanney, Austin wrote:
 > Thanks everyone.. this one seems to be doing it. Taking its time
 > but its a hell of a lot of data to move (about 10 gb). The funny
 > thing is that its data thats stored on a windoze server but there
 > is basically no percievable way to actually do this with windows
 > so I had to mount the share on the Linux box and do it through this!

I was just thinking about this last week.

Graphical file browsers are not very useful
for working on a tree IMHO, which is very common.
Even for files in one directory it's hard to perform
a common operation on each file.

Lately this has become much more of a problem due
to web sites and picture archives for e.g.
In essence since we're digitizing stuff in increasing
volumes, the current interfaces to that data are showing
their limitations. There is a lot of fluff lately about
digital workflows which usually boil down to a mess of
proprietry apps that are limited in their scope:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-6453-6821

Graphical browsers are useful for navigating to a certain file
in a tree or selecting disjoint sets of files. The former isn't
scalable really as one needs to search the tree as it gets large.
The later is usually only required for (re)filing in the
hierarchy. Note, for filing I find a two pane view of source
and destination directory is optimal and mc is my util
of choice for this. One could have a "two pane" view by having
multiple instances of the graphical browser and using drag and drop.
However I've seen very few people use them like this.

In summary, I think interacting with data through
an "explorer" type interface is extremely inefficient.
Also unix (Linux/OS X/...) should become more popular due to its
elegance in dealing with (large amounts) of data.

-- 
Pádraig Brady - http://www.pixelbeat.org
--- Following generated by rotagator ---

Users

su            #change to root user
su -l         #same but get correct root $PATH etc. (login shell)
su -l user    #change to user
su -c "cmd"   #just run cmd as root and exit
sudo cmd      #just run cmd as root without password and exit
visudo        #setup sudo (as root). `man sudoers` for more info
--