GNOME Weekly News 20th to 26th October

Actually, the problem might be more severe than just speed. If you read the nautilus interview, you'll notice comments by Alex and Dave:

Christian: The Icon View could be extended more. Would you consider having a pluggable interface for it, so that:

* thumbnailing and autoplay on hover for video would be possible ?

* different information under each icon for each type of file is possible (ie pixel size and color depth for images, length in time of audio and video, and so on)

"Alexander: The Icon view is quite integrated with the core Nautilus code at the moment, so it is very hard to do things like this. This is quite sad, since it means you can't e.g. write external Nautilus views (e.g. a cvs view) that uses the icon view. I would like this to change in the future, but designing the right APIs to allow this and not cripple our ability to make changes to the Nautilus internals is very hard.

Dave: Agree with Alexander again here, something like that would be good to have. Right now things like Apotheke, the CVS view, have to recreate the whole directory view, which is a pain. It leads to views that don't integrate well with the rest of nautilus (and more often, views that just aren't written). There aren't any concrete plans for this at the moment."

This is a problem... For one thing it means that certain plugins will be very hard to make (massive barrier to entry). Also, having looked at the code I've noticed almost no comments. I have no idea how to even get started working on Nautilus...