Deleting documents from the inside of applications (CosimoCecchi)

This could prove as a very useful feature for consistency across the desktop, and is a (small) step towards a more "semantic" desktop. Right now it seems you can do several things in an application (say Evince for instance) when viewing a document (you can save it, open another, making a new one); but to delete it, you have to resort opening a file manager window, remember or find out the location where the file is in, browsing to it and eventually trash it. This is even worse in some cases, like the following.

Use Case

• Bob downloads a PDF file with Epiphany/Firefox, which both have the option (turned on by default IIRC) to silently download the files to a "known" location (default == Desktop usually).
• After looking at the PDF, he decides it's not worth to keep it on disk.
• He must close Evince, go to the Desktop, find the file and delete it.

• Many users won't do this; I've seen very crowded Desktops, and mine is often as well, because we're all too lazy to take care of manually cleaning up if there isn't an easy way for it.

Interested applications inside the GNOME Desktop set (that comes to my mind)

• EOG -> Already has this feature

• Evince
• GEdit
• Totem
• maybe Rhythmbox/Banshee (though they're not strictly part of GNOME).

Other ideas linked to this

• Automatic saving of the files; if you provide a way to delete a file (i.e. conceptually throw away your or something else's work) then it might make sense to replace the "You're closing your app, do you want to me to throw away your stuff?" with some automatic save feature. This would cope well with the idea of document opening/closing zooming in/out from a (preview) icon (imagine this happens when you close your GEdit window and something is saved automatically with some name on the desktop).

Plan

• Come up with patches for the relevant projects.

• Might make sense to have GTK+ (or maybe libgnome-desktop) provide a default set of actions for "Document-based" applications? Something like {gtk/gnome}_action_entry_get_document_set () and {gtk/gnome}_action_entry_document_set_callbacks () to avoid c/p code between all the applications that have "Open"/"Save"/"SaveAs"/"Close"/"Trash" ?