[ILUG] RE: Inefficiency of graphical file browsers

[Tanney, Austin]

I couldnt agree more. The project we've been working on has invoved 
dealing with huge numbers of files and lots of data. As a result of 
this, to deal with the windows side of it, the only way Ive been able 
to deal with it without going nuts is to run two monitors and, on some 
occasions, up to 6 copies of windows explorer open to move files around 
to the necessary folders and to track progress. Command line based file 
moving and manipulation really is so much easier. This final stage though, 
where basically I am moving 20gb of data as 200,00 files from 1000 folders.. 
If I had to do this though graphical browsers it would have taken me about 
a week of dragging and dropping. I can feel the RSI twinges just at the 
thought of it! 

Austin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: P at draigBrady.com [mailto:P at draigBrady.com]
> Sent: 28 September 2004 17:49
> To: ilug
> Cc: Tanney, Austin
> Subject: Inefficiency of graphical file browsers
> 
> 
> 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
> --
>