Spring loaded folders in Caja/other Linux file managers ?
 

Hi

I am interested in spring loaded folders (Mac OS-style) and my favorite file manager is Caja.
I think I found a vague reference to spring loaded folders in Caja (although not in the master branch) but I was not able to find this option anywhere in Caja.
Here is the link about the mention to spring loaded folders in Caja:
https://github.com/aubade/mate-file-manager

Could someone please tell me if spring loaded folders are actually available in Caja, or in any other Linux file manager?

Thanks

--Grabby

what is "spring loaded"???
do you mean some sort of animation when you doubleclick a folder?
i doubt that MATE, as a lightweight desktop environment, offers this sort of expensive eye candy.
try KDE.


yes, the string "spring-loaded" is found.
you can click on it, it's a link.
folders are not mentioned, but windows instead, and i don't think it has anything to do with animations.

No, this functionality is not provided by Caja. The project you linked to is basically a fork of Caja, rather than a Caja extension, which provided spring-loaded folders to Caja's behaviour, but it hasn't been updated in quite a few years and therefore is probably to be avoided on a more up-to-date system due to the dependencies that it would require and the fact that you would be running a very old version of Caja.

You might want to contact the developer of the project and ask them how easy they think it would be for their mods to be incorporated into Caja as it stands now.

This functionality used to be available in Nautilus but it appears that it was hard baked in, so there were actually complaints from people who said that they didn't have enough time hovering over a folder before the spring-loaded feature activated, and thus they wanted the feature removed.

On further examination, it appears that the whole question of the lack of spring-loaded folders could be linked to Apple reportedly having a patent on them (https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/pull/110 - https://mail.gnome.org/archives/naut.../msg00198.html). However, this patent may or may not still be current or even exist. If this is a feature that you really require then I would suggest raising an issue with Caja through the site I just linked to and/or contacting the developer aubade who is mentioned there.

I have found out that the latest Nautilus (called Files) has this feature!!
So, why not Caja?!
The reason given by those users who complained about it hardly makes any sense at all: if they do not want to wait one second for the folder to open, they can just click on the folder, thus ignoring this feature.
On the other hand, this feature is very useful when you have to copy/move a file into a deeply nested sub-folder and you have to browse your way to find that folder.
I so wish this could be implemented in Caja...

I found it annoying a few times.

The thing is while it is handy for copying into deeply nested folders, until one gets used to it, one will end up making copies in wrong folders accidentally if another folder happens to hop up under the formerly 'selected' folder.

... or GNOME.

I noticed that Mint 19 Cinnamon's Nemo File Manager has springloading, that the first I seen it. Kind of neat...:D

It seems that spring loaded folders are gaining ground then :)
Initially they were used only on Mac OS, and open source developers were afraid that it could be a proprietary feature of some sort, so they were afraid to introduce it to Linux file managers. But now I guess that hurdle has been overcome. Good for us.

Now we just need a feature that lets us turn the damn thing off.