[Interest] Qt 5 and filesystem

[Mark]

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 10:12 PM, Charley Bay <charleyb123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

Certainly a interesting point of view!
I both agree and disagree with it.

Agree: in terms of creating completely new gui's with the power of
QML. Using that you can certainly come up with very interesting
alternatives.

Disagree: in todays desktop world a treeview - or lets put it
differently, representing data in a tree - is not something you can
"just" discard. Another reason is that having a tree like gui element
is a lot more convenient than making the same using a bunch of
listviews.