Circulation for your files

Most systems naturally let you browse their data (files or other items) in a top-to-bottom fashion: from a folder to a file, from a blog to a particular post, from a photo album to an individual picture. However, not all of them let you navigate the other way, and this impedes circulation among your data: they make it hard to regain context when you are viewing a single item.

Consider a traditional, hierarchical file system. The conventional way of operating on a file is through various "paths":

  • You find the file in your file manager, and launch it. This launches an application window that shows your file.
  • You launch an application, and use its File/Open command to open a file.
  • You run a program from the command line and pass it an argument for the file to operate on.

Here, the movement is downwards: you go from a global context (your whole desktop, or file system), to a local one (the contents of your file or document).

When a document lives in such a hierarchy, it is likely to be in a folder or other kind of grouping with related items: pictures that need to be included in a textual document, data files that you used to build a final report, other files with the same tag or category, etc. It is natural to want to see these related items because of their proximity to the document you are using.

Such a system needs to provide upward movement from the files back to the desktop or file system. A simple "Show in file manager" command, for example, solves this problem: it lets you "step back" from the file you are visiting to see its surrounding context.

For a hierarchical file system, the "Show in file manager" command would make the file manager show the folder in which the file lives, while at the same time highlighting the file so you can find it. From there you can of course perform common tasks like rename the file, copy it, delete it, etc. — actions which may be cumbersome to do from within the program or sub-view that you normally use to edit the file, precisely because it is not designed to give you the context you need.

For any other kind of grouping (not a hierarchical file system), there would be an immediate way to show the group(s) in which the file or data in question lives. Again, this puts the file in context with its siblings, and gives you an appropriate context for general commands which work on the file itself (and on any other such files), rather than the specific commands to operate on the file's contents. For example, an photo viewer with tags should let you go from the particular photo you are viewing, to the photos that also contain the same tags as your photo: there it makes sense to have commands like "make photo album", which do not make sense within a single photo.

Therefore:

When viewing a single file or item, provide an obvious way to visit its surrounding context — such as the folder in which a file lives, or the groups to which an item belongs. This way you get downward and upward circulation from groups to items, and from items back to groups.

Relevant bugs

Discussion

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Initiatives/DocumentCentricGnome/Circulation for your files (last edited 2013-11-22 21:04:53 by WilliamJonMcCann)