Please retain state of Open > All Files / All Text Files

[Jason Gerard DeRose]

Okay, maybe I'm one of very few who actually uses gedit for coding, but here's my workflow problem:

1) I need to open another source file, so I Open...

2) gedit nicely displays the contents of the last directory I've open anything from, which often contains several dozen source files.

3) But only on very rare occasions am I interested in a ".py~" file, and I've never felt the need to open a ".pyc" file, so I select "All Text Files" instead of "All Files" so I can more quickly find the ".py" file I'm looking for.

4) 53 seconds later, I feel the need to open some other ".py" file, but to my constant annoyance, gedit has reverted to "All Files", so I must select "All Text Files" again.

5) Repeat.

I'm not much of a C hacker and am swamped with another project at the moment, so I wont be able fix this myself anytime soon. That being said, I know beggars can't be choosers, but here is my plea for how this should be implemented:

At the very least the All Files / Text Files state should persist during a given session, but please don't bother doing it this way if you do anything at all: save it permanently with gconf key. Persistence of state always makes an application easier to learn and quicker to use.

I also think that "All Text Files" should be the default. As gedit (or gtk or nautilus or whatever) obviously does something more intelligent than just check file extensions, I think that very seldom would gedit hide something that the user wished to open (for example, you can still open '/etc/network/interfaces' in the "Text Files" mode). Remember, novice users don't tend to be "power" users of text editors anyway.

I'm not sure if this can be changed easily or is instead set in the gtk file chooser whatever widget, but please replace the ComboBox with two RadioButtons. It's silly to use a drop-down when there are only two options. It's better always to show the user the selected state and the alternate state.

Lastly, I think this phrasing is clearer (for the English anyway): "Text Files Only" and "All Files". Again, please make "Text Files Only" the default.

Thanks! Or maybe I'll have time to do it myself in the not so distant future. ;)

[Dean Sas (dsas)]

Hi, the software developers have a bug open about this here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=329291

Seemingly it hasn't been worked on yet because there isn't an easy way to catch 100% of text files in the filter

[Jason Gerard DeRose (jderose)]

Although I would prefer Text Files Only to be the default, http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=329291 is a different bug than what I'm discussing here.

Perhaps there are enough problems with the mime types that making Text Files the default isn't a good idea... but the real bug, in my opinion, is that the state the user has selected isn't retained. If this were fixed, I wouldn't particularly care what the default was because I could effectively set my own.

[Dean Sas (dsas)]

You've reported multiple bugs in your original report which then makes it harder to corrolate bugs with upstream ones, and note when a bug has been fixed and released.

These are the bugs I can see in your report:
1. gedit doesn't retain state
2. the default should be "only text files"
3. radio buttons would be nicer
4. the phrasing should be changed.

It'd be easier if you could make one bug report for each issue.

I forwarded issue 1 to the software developers here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357529

Thanks,
Dean

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

fixed upstream

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Fixed in Feisty.