Re: Behavior for the file browser window

[John W. Eaton]

On 04/07/2013 04:57 AM, Torsten wrote:
> On 07.04.2013 06:59, John W. Eaton wrote:>  Follow-up Comment #6, patch
> #8000 (project octave):
> > I'm not sure what the behavior should be for the file browser window.
> >
> > Your change makes it so that moving around in the file browser also changes
> > the current working directory for Octave.  Is that the behavior we want?  I
> > think of file browsing as independent of what the curent working directory is.
> >   It seems to me we should only change the current working directory if some
> > explicit action is taken in the file browser.
> >
> > Maybe we should discuss this on the maintainers list before making more
> > changes.
>
> Currently, the file browser widget do change the octave directory when
> browsing through the directories. AFAIK this is the behavior of the ML
> current folder browser, too.

What I see is that you can search for files in the file browser
without changing Octave's current working directory.  Only when you
select a new diretory by double-clicking in the file browser list box
do you change Octave's current working directory.  Perhaps that is too
confusing without having another clue that this behavior is
intentional.  For example, a button to change to the selected
directory.

If navigating in the file browser is supposed to change Octave's
current working directory every time a new directory is opened for
browsing, then I don't see the point of having both the file browser
and the text entry box for the current directory.  Why not just have
the file browser?

jwe