From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; fr-FR; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: In Nautilus, you can open documents in an application or you can open them in a Nautilus' view. I think the default behaviour should be to open the document in a view only if the document's type corresponds to a read-only file type. For example, opening a video could be done in a Nautilus view (provided this view has a way to play/pause/stop, go backwards/forwards, view in fullscreen, disable the screensaver etc...) while opening a text file should be done in gedit. For pictures, I imagine they should be opened in views as you seldom modify pictures (except for image professionals). But, like for videos, if you open pictures in a view, you have to be sure that this view is powerful enough to enable suers to view other pictures quickly (using thumbnails or previous/next buttons), start a slide show, view in fullscreen etc... I think the important point is that views should be used only if they are powerful enough not to prevent users to preform the basic tasks they are expected to perform with each type of document (those basic tasks depend on the document's type) because it can be confusing to get "trapped" in a view and not knowing what to do... Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.N.A. 2. 3. Actual Results: N.A. Expected Results: N.A. Additional info: N.A.
There is no way Nautilus can second guess how the user wants to open a file. That is why nautilus allows you to both open in a view and with an app. Plus you can select what you want to do by default.
In fact, I was asking _Redhat_ to fix the defaults, not you (Alex) to fix Nautilus, as I already know that Nautilus can do that.
Well. I totally disagree with you on text files for instance (I read them much more often than I edit them when browsing with Nautilus), and there has been a lot of discussions about views vs apps on the mailing list, so its clear that this is not an trivial choice. Red hat will not change the defaults of the core types, since that would be subverting the direction of the Gnome project. If you want to affect the future direction of the Nautilus user experience, please take part in the Gnome project.