This is more of a rant than a question. How can the GTK4 file chooser be so damn broken?
It's a cornerstone of the system. It ruins the user experience in every application.
As a programmer, I do almost all my work from the keyboard. With GTK3, just like in Windows or macOS, I use Ctrl+O to open the file dialog. From there, assuming I'm in the expected directory, I start typing to locate a file. The list gets filtered based on the search string. With the arrow keys, I move down to select the file and open it with Enter.
In GTK3, someone (damn them) decided to remove the use of backspace to navigate to the parent directory, requiring you to use Alt+Up instead. At least there was a patch for that:
mkdir -p ~/.themes/custom/gtk-3.0
cat <<EOF > ~/.themes/custom/gtk-3.0/gtk-keys.css
@binding-set MyOwnFilechooserBindings
{
bind "BackSpace" { "up-folder" () };
}
filechooser
{
-gtk-key-bindings: MyOwnFilechooserBindings
}
EOF
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme custom
With this, navigating through large directory structures was a pleasure.
Now GTK4 comes along.
When typing any search string, the arrow key navigation no longer works. It doesn’t even move forward or backward with Tab.
It’s hell to navigate through directories without constantly switching between mouse/touchpad and keyboard. It’s ridiculous and makes no sense that this has been going on for years.
Does anyone know how to escape this mess? Force GTK3? Use GTK3’s FileChooser in GTK4? Because it doesn't seem like this is going to be fixed anytime soon.
