art with code

2016-12-07

Filezoo, the plan for month two

Okay, so I have this quite feature-complete, if an unpolished memory hog of a file manager. Where to go from here? What are my goals?

The goals I have for Filezoo are: 1) taking care of casual file management and 2) looking good.

Putting the second part aside, since it's just a matter of putting in months of back-breaking, err, finger-callousing graphics work, let's focus on casual file management.

Casual file management is about having an always-on non-intrusive file manager at your beck and call in a place where you can summon it from with the flick of a wrist. I.e. in the bottom right corner of my desktop.

A casual file manager doesn't necessarily do every single thing imaginable, but draws a line between stuff you want do every day and stuff that you think might be nice to have if you were the most awesome secret agent file managing around the filesystems of your adversaries. The major difference there being that while, yes, the second category is totally awesome and full of great ideas and groundbreaking UI work, you'll end up doing all that stuff on the shell anyhow.

So, a casual file manager should do the file managery stuff and leave the rest to the shell. Which, by the way, is also a great way to cut down on the amount of work and expectations. "It's just a casual file manager, it doesn't need to have split views and all that other crazy shit! Use the shell, dude!"

Things that file managers are better at than the shell: presenting a clickable list of the filesystem tree, selecting files by clicking, showing thumbnails, looking pretty. Things that the shell is better at: doing stuff to lists of files, opening files in the program you want.

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