Nathan Hurst dichiarò:
So if we can fix a GTK problem on our own, especially such a bad problem as this one, we must. By the way this will also be a good hint to GTK for them to fix things, stronger than regular user complaints I think.
Absolutely. The gnome people seem to have forgotten about actually testing their designs. The non-debian gnome 2.4 file dialog can only be described as primitive and sucky. They have also demonstrated disinterest in external improvements -- the 2.2 file dialog was attrocious and debian and mandrake both had replaced it with something functional and simple, yet gnome refused to incorporate this change, instead inventing their own even more dysfunctional system.
The old file dialog was very ugly, as it was a leftover from GNOME 1.x (which was ugly for a thousand reason).
Noone in GNOME 2.x remade the file dialog because there was the need to redo the API first, but noone did it before GNOME 2.6.
The only thing that was done was the simple patch from Ximina Desktop, included in Debian (and Mandrake, I suppose).
But the old file dialog was still very ugly. Only a little bit more functional, but still a pain to use.
The new file dialog is a lot better to use. It needs only a little bit of pratice to get used, but is a lot simpler, in particular using it with the mouse.
The decision to hide the text entry (it is still here, just press Ctrl-L as in a web browser) was taken to hide the complexities and the differences of the underlying OS from the user.
Now he can ignore if inkscape is running on linux ("/"), MacOS (":") or Windows (""): the file separator is hidden, giving a better consistency between different platforms. If he want to use it, just press Ctrl-L and be done, but for non-geek users I can guarantee it is a lot better (tested on my parents :)