Konqueror delete unification

[Tim Jansen]

On Sunday 13 July 2003 10:28, David Hugh-Jones wrote:
> * konqueror automatically asks if you want to trash a remote file the
> first time you try to; if you opt just to delete it, and check "don't
> ask again", it alters your setting.

I think that many people won't understand this; they will ask 'why is deleting 
a file to complicated? I just want to delete it, other OSs don't ask me 
stupid details of how to delete it'. 

> * emphasis on deleting the file, rather than "moving it to the trash" -
> which chimes more with what users want to do.

Do they really? If you would ask users whether they want be able to recover 
files that they have accidentally deleted (independent of the 
implementation), almost everybody will say 'yes'. 
If you ask a user while deleting a file whether he wants to recover this file 
later, almost everybody will say 'no'. Because in that moment they think they 
do the right thing, so why should they move it to trash if they could get rid 
of it immediately?

There are two reasons why people want to delete (instead of move to trash):
1. because they want to conserve disk space
2. because they want that nobody is able to view that file

(1) is also somewhat triggered by human instincts. Even when there are 
gigaytes of free disk space people still want to have as much as possible. A 
similar effect can be seen in older MacOS versions: originally the trash icon 
was always the same. Later somebody had the idea that the trash icon should 
show it when there was something in the trash. The result was that people 
started emptying the trash after deleting, because it is a good idea to empty 
your trash bin early & often. In general usability guys seem to regard that 
change in MacOS as a bad thing BTW...
However, (1) could also be solved by a intelligent mechanism to clean up the 
trash when the disk space is low (but automatically, not with annoying 
dialogs like in windows - if something is in trash there should not be any 
guarantes thatthe file may stay there).

(2) is a rare case and can be solved by the user emptying the trash manually. 
And, of course, it is not secure (but when you want to hide something from 
family members it's quite unlikely that they will start to search on your raw 
disk for old files, so most people wont care).

> This took longer than I naively expected.

Well, that's almost everybody's problem :)

bye...