The GTK+ file selector dialog has always been a failure.
Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 12:32 AM.Today I read yet another criticism of the GTK+ file selector dialog. And I must say, the criticism is completely valid, but nothing new. The GTK+ file dialog has always been one of the shames of the open source world.
Anyone reading this who doesn't agree and hasn't yet looked at the screenshot included in the article linked to above, please go check it out. There is no way that the appearance and layout of that dialog can be justified. It goes beyond a minor bug or annoyance, to the point of the dialog being unusable.
The poor state of the GTK+ file chooser dialog has been noted by a number of other people in the past. This artice, from 2007, goes step-by-step through the pains one must endure to just save a file using the GTK+ file selector dialog. There is an Ubuntu Brainstorm idea from 2008 that is calling for improvements to the GTK+ file dialog. There is a forum post from early 2005 pointing out the various UI design flaws of the GTK+ file selector dialog, plus a screenshot comparison to the much better KDE file dialog. Even regular GNOME users feel it is confusing and needs improvements, and it is also inefficient to use.
In fact, we can go all the way back to this archived screenshot from the GTK+ Web site, apparently taken before the end of January 1999. As we can see, there has been little real improvement over the past decade. While the file selector dialogs of other UI toolkits and environments have evolved and improved over time, the GTK+ file dialog started out lousy, and has remained that way for years. And I don't think it can be salvaged. What's there now needs to be trashed, and re-implemented properly, drawing from the more usable file selector dialogs of Qt, FOX Toolkit, and even Microsoft Windows.
