[Interest] Qt 5 and filesystem

[Charley Bay]

Mark sayeth:

> <snip>, KDE has a "little" (pun intended) thingy called
> "KIO". It's a very massive IO framework that has support for a lot of
> different filesystems. It's all working under Qt and is right now in
> the progress of being ported to a Qt only library (as in no other
> dependencies needed to run other then KIO + Qt). Lately i've been
> doing a lot of experimenting with KIO + QML. <snip>,


One big thing that you will also encounter when using QML + filesystem
> related stuff is the complete lack of trees! Right now there is no way
> to display a treeview in QML. And i don't mean through proxy stuff.
> Just using QML + imports. I am experimenting in that area as well to
> get a treeview working properly but that's kinda tricky. Qt should
> really try to improve a bit here and offer some default components
> that can display a tree like structure.
>

On the "tree-view" ... after MUCH thinking (and experimentation), I'm
pretty close to concluding, "We don't need tree-views".

At first I *wanted* them, but after much experimentation where a
"(List-)Model" may be a "property" of a higher-level thing (like an
item-within-a-model), I've decided that I don't need them (yet).  Further,
the specific domain of experimentation happens to be for
"file-system-type-things".

As an example, here's a link to discussion about a number of
"file-system-viewer-things" (visualizing hard drive usage in this example),
where IMHO the "best-ones" don't use a "tree-view":

<
http://superuser.com/questions/8248/how-can-i-visualize-the-file-system-usage-on-windows
>

QML is so "visual" and "dynamic", that IMHO there are *much* better ways to
visualize stuff (like files) than through a tree-view.  Fundamentally, IMHO
tree-views are so incredibly "wasteful" regarding visual-real-estate.

I concede "tree-views" may be necessary in some domains, but generally, I
think users hate them, and there are likely better ways to represent
information.  I assume the best reason in favor of tree-views is that they
are "familiar", although they seem to impose a "widget-like" historical
perspective that may be incompatible with new UI paradigms.

--charley
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/attachments/20130107/a2593d9c/attachment.html>