Emptying trash without alert

[Giova84]

hrev45349 When i empty the trash, no warnings about is showed. Since the option "don't move file to trash" was removed recently, an alert should be added when we empty the trash, for coherence :-)

[leavengood]

Well, strictly speaking, removing that option just made the trash "always on", and that doesn't really mean that an alert is now needed when emptying the trash. In other words if the alert is needed now it was needed before too.

Personally I'm not opposed to this. But I generally prefer using undo over an alert. Though having undo for emptying the trash is a bit tricky. What might be neat is to delay the emptying for 30 seconds (or some reasonable timeout), to give the user a chance to cancel it. Sort of like when you trash something in Gmail you get a chance to undo that until you perform some other action on the page. Though it might be quite a bit of work to implement this. But maybe having a "delay this action for x amount of time and allow it to be cancelled" functionality in Tracker might be useful for other things.

[Giova84]

Replying to leavengood:

Though it might be quite a bit of work to implement this. But maybe having a "delay this action for x amount of time and allow it to be cancelled" functionality in Tracker might be useful for other things.

Maybe this could be implemented using a notification window? Notification windows are "clickable" and can contains a command (for example i use notification window to check my inbox, and if i click on this windows i can open my inbox) just an idea :-)

[Giova84]

Could look like this (image mockup attached)

[humdinger]

Maybe not widely known, Trcker has a general undo function, i.e. with ALT+Z you can undo the last action. That should include the Trash, I think, but there seems to be a bug. ALT+Z after emptying the Trash fails with an alert "Error moving "%name".

[diver]

It is documented in #8552.

[axeld]

Emptying the trash is supposed to delete the files. If you don't want that, just keep the files in there. Unless the file system supports an undelete natively (ie. some sort of snapshot feature, and that it always tries to write to new space, like ZFS and copycats), the best you can do otherwise is either (optionally) annoy the user with a requester, or have the system automatically manage the trash, ie. start removing older files from there when the space gets tight).

Of course, something like that would also work with a secondary hidden trash. Not sure if I that is a good idea, even though it would resemble the auto-manage feature.

When the trash is removed, the files are really gone, so Alt-Z can't help you there ATM.

[waddlesplash]

Moving Tracker enhancement tickets out of R1 milestone -- Tracker's source code comes from BeOS R5, so it already has all the features it did on R5.

[return_0e]

Patch to warn user whilst emptying trash.

[humdinger]

Do we really want to have such an alert?
Right-clicking the Trash and choosing "Empty Trash" is in my experience nothing I've done by accident. If I need space, or consider emptying the Trash, I double-click the Trash icon and see what's in it. Most of the time it's too full to examine the contents in detail anyway, so I think "Well, I've already chugged it in the Trash with good reason before, let's get rid of it...".
And after choosing "Empty Trash" deliberately, I won't have changed my mind in the microsecond it took the alert to pop up. I may have regrets a minute or a week later, but the additional button click wouldn't have saved me...

If it is decided it's a good idea to have such an alert, I'd prefer a button "Empty Trash" instead of "Proceed".

[return_0e]

Replying to humdinger:

Do we really want to have such an alert?

Well, I've looked at other OSes that do this such as Finder (macOS), Nautilus (Ubuntu) and Windows Explorer. By default they seem to always ask the user before emptying the rubbish bin. Tracker could have a 'always ask' option to show these alerts.

[humdinger]

No option! :)

Other OS do all kinds of annoying things, so I'm not convinced. :)

[axeld]

I'm also not convinced that this helps anybody. The only thing that would really help would be an "Undo" button. I find myself always pressing "YES NOW IMMEDIATELY" with this kind of superfluous dialogs, only to realize later what I actually did :-)

[pulkomandy]

I also think this is useless and gets in the way.