today
I jumped from MS-DOS to Macintosh and I pretty much skipped right over the Norton Commander style file managers – but the Macintosh’s spatial approach shaped how I view file management (and the switch to a navigational approach in Mac OS X certainly felt like a step backwards) – currently, it looks like only Caja and Konqueror still offer a spatial mode
- A single window represents each opened directory.
- Each window is unambiguously and irrevocably tied to a particular directory.
- Stability: files, directories, and windows go where the user moves them, stay where the user puts them (“preserve their spatial state”), and retain all their other “physical” characteristics (such as size, shape, color and location).
- The same item can only be viewed in one window at a time.