Sugar Commander

[mokurai at earthtreasury.org]

On Sat, July 23, 2011 8:41 am, Walter Bender wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 1:06 AM, Carlos Nazareno <object404 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>>You can see the contents of thumb
>>> drives and SD cards as a hierarchical file system instead of as
>>> imitating
>>> the Journal.  You can copy files into the Journal from anywhere on the
>>> file
>>> system.  It is my idea of what the Journal should be like.  You can
>>> check it out here:
>>
>> *thank god*
>>
>> I'm sorry, I don't mean to ruffle any feathers, but the flat journal
>> is a really broken model when you stick in a USB stick with 2000+
>> files in hierarchical directories and you want to copy files to XO's
>> journal (like ebook pdfs).
>>
>> It just becomes plain unusable.

I have not found it to be so. I find that the Journal's search capability
is frequently more useful than a hierarchical view of my files. When I
want to look at the file system directly, apart from trying to teach it to
students, I prefer the Midnight Commander.

>> It's fine when you have a few files on your USB stick, but if it's a
>> USB stick that's in common use with hundreds of files and you just
>> want to sneakernet a few files to XOOS-Sugar from one machine to the
>> XO, it's a real pain (so much so that I just backed up the contents of
>> my USB stick, deleted everything except the files I wanted to transfer
>> to XO-Sugar, then did the transer).

You can archive a group of files for transfer under a name that will
appear at the top of the list, or one easy to remember and search for.

>> Telling people to just use the command line or midnight commander is
>> not a solution, it's a hack because you're breaking out of the sugar
>> model/system.

The Terminal command line is deliberately included within Sugar for
several important reasons. I don't see what makes it a hack. You could
just as well say that Write is a hack because we try to minimize the use
of words in other Sugar activities. The Sugar design guidelines are not
meant to be laws.

>>The better solution would be something like the above,
>> an alternate file browser that's a native sugar app.

I still prefer Midnight Commander for some purposes, while being delighted
with Sugar Commander. YMMV.

>> Kudos!
>
> Nothing wrong with providing alternative approaches

Agreed.

> (a similar
> activity was written by Ceibal in 2007 for exactly this purpose as I
> recall) and fixing corner cases (I think the USB indexing issue was
> addressed in more recent Sugar builds), but please do not confine the
> vision of the Journal as simply a replacement for the file manager.

I don't know that anybody ever said it was. I believe that the idea is
that the Journal is easier for indexing work in progress than a
hierarchical file system, and that we preferred to teach the use of the
search facilities in the Journal rather than file system navigation. The
new Unity 2D UI that Ubuntu defaults to makes the same decision, and it
works well.

> Please see http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4437
>
> "It is my idea of what the Journal should be like."
>
> regards.
>
> -walter
>
>>
>> --
>> carlos nazareno
>> http://twitter.com/object404
>> http://www.object404.com
>> --
>> poverty is violence

Agreed. See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, and Thorstein Veblen, The
Theory of the Leisure Class. Both, in my opinion, should be required
reading in all schools at an appropriate level.

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>> Devel at lists.laptop.org
>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
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>


-- 
Edward Mokurai
(默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر
ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks