This post is based on a usability rant I shared with Pedro which in turn ended up on one of his posts about the Mac Finder. My initial take on the subject was based on my daily use of Ubuntu (with Gnome as the default Desktop Environment) when compared to Windows (probably any flavour).

Say I’m a average joe user and I’d want to copy or move some files around: Coalesce the contents of two directories into one, with a lot of files on both of them, some of them sharing the same filename, with different modification times.

So basically, when a user tries this stunt on his windows box, he’ll get a bunch of messages from his default file manager like this one:

Excess information can sometimes turn into a burden (*). But it won’t take an experienced user to notice when he’s overwriting a newer file with an old version (or worst, replacing it with a zero sized file).

Let’s compare it to the Nautilus one (and let me remind you, Nautilus is the default file manager for Gnome, which is bundled on Ubuntu).

Not only do the path and filename appear chopped, but there’s no mention about the files properties. Nice, uh? (NOT!)

Some will say a true power user would always check for file contents regardless of timestamps or filesizes. Or use some sort of versioning system. This will obviously fail for a large amount of files or when file content is proprietary (closed) or binary. But there are always a number of occasions I’d want my files overwritten. A bigger-than-zero sized file is probably more useful than a zero-sized one. I want some sort of control. Any control.

Just to keep things straight, the Mac Finder will show only the filename but omit the file properties. Even better, it looks like there’s no chance to randomly overwrite some files and leave others unharmed. The user keeps control over the process. If there are files with the same name in the destination, then there’s probably something wrong with the process and that was not what we wanted in the first place and we can just “stop” it. Cool.

I went further and got my hands on a Suse box (with KDE) to play around and check its behaviour. And it’s amazing, because at the fourth iteration you still get a different approach (how many more can there be?). Here’s how Konqueror deals with the issue:

So basically, this is the ugliest message box of them all, it’s cluttered but you can overwrite the file, rename it to something else using some intelligence (image.0.jpg) or cancel the whole process.

The fact that each operating system / file explorer / window manager / whatever has a different behavior proves there is no easy solution (or at least consensual) for this question – so each one does what it thinks is right for the user. I understand the need to keep things simple, but sometimes we need to have the right tools for the right tasks. As there are multiple user profiles, wouldn’t it be easy to keep simple dialog boxes (like the Mac) giving the user some power whether he’d want some more information or control over his file operations?

(*) Don’t get me started and ranting on Windows lack of usability. Everytime I see one of these dialog boxes I got a shiver up my spine:

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