[PLUG] I really hate the gtk file picker

[Gordon Dexter <gordon@texasdex.com>]

There are lots of reasons.

The reason that prompted this post is that the autocomplete is obnoxious 
and broken: Every time I type in something that can be auto-completed, 
it does it for me, but if I keep on typing that name after it is 
autocompleted, it doesn't ignore the extra characters.  For example, if 
Music is the only folder that begins with M in the current directory, 
when I hit M it will fill it in as Music, but _it doesn't highlight it_, 
so if I type in the full word instead of stopping when it autocompletes, 
I get "Music/usic" which is seriously annoying.  Furthermore, if I'm 
selecting a file called Hello and I type in He and it autocompletes the 
rest, I hit OK and it turns out somehow I've selected the nonexistent 
file "He" in spite of the autocomplete.

There are a lot of other issues I have with it, including lack of 
thumbnails, the lack of a box to type the filename into, etc.  I would 
vastly prefer the WINDOWS file picker if I had that option.  I just 
really hate the thing, and I would be very happy if I never had to use 
it again.  I know Firefox and Thunderbird have an about:config option 
that lets you use a better (or at least less overtly annoying) picker, 
and believe me that's the first thing I do when I install them, but I 
also use a few GTK based applications, such as Pidgin and Gimp, that 
don't have such an option.

I saw a workaround that let you use the KDE picker instead, but it was 
an ugly hack and it didn't work very well, crashed, etc.  Knowing the 
Gnome philosophy of "the user is stupid so don't give them any options" 
I'm guessing there's anything I can do to turn off the autocomplete.  Is 
there really nothing else I can do?  Am I going to continue to be at the 
mercy of the Gnome interface nazis even when I'm using KDE?  Even people 
who like Gnome should realize that it's not for everybody, and some 
people who aren't using Gnome will still have to use the file picker.  
I'm not sure if this is a request for help or a rant, but if anybody has 
any helpful suggestions or thoughts I'd be happy to hear them.

--Gordon

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