Folder pane needs nice way to delete items from the folder.

[timbl]

Currently, there is no way to delete files ot folders in the folder list, unless you are Developer and have access to the Internals pane.

Possibilities are many

• adding red buttons on each item, or
• checkboxes on each item and a general delete button
• '...' more stuff icon on each thing, submenu allowing not only delete but other things like copy link, like, etc.
• trashcan which things can be dragged onto.

Check other systems and pod browsers for their UI languages.

[jeff-zucker]

We may want to consider incorporating Solid-File-Client that @bourgeoa and I and a team of others have developed over the past three years. It has extensive tests and works in or out of a browser to provide the following operations on container trees : recursive delete, move, copy, zip. We'd have to invent a UI, but the guts of all the major operations are there.

[jeff-zucker]

I'd see it working like this :

• user clicks an "edit folder" button
• checkboxes appear next to all contained resources
• a selectbox of actions (delete, move, zip, etc.) appears
• when user selections an action, checks some boxes, and clicks do it
• we ask for confirmation

[jeff-zucker]

Valid destination for move, copy, zip could be in same pod or a different pod or local file system, solid-file-client handles all the same including transferring .acl and .meta to local when needed.

[timea-solid]

Some additional ideas from chats:

• if one deletes a folder one gets a message that warns the user that the action will delete also its content.
  And in addition, if I think about an OS, I could imagine also having a trash can where I can drag and drop a folder into. Prompting the same message.
• Or right click on the folder and delete.
• When you are helping someone decide whether they really want to delete something, then things like “A total of 1452 files in 132 folders - around 12.4GB” which is probably the best we can do for now, and is what a laptop OS would give you.
• But a user would be better served by “Your medical data between 2004-01 and 2008-09” or “Thirteen albums, 1340 photos, 789 tracks and 18 playlists”
• Note a big link between the function which lets them see what they are throwing away and the one which shows them what they have given people access to, or [potentially] consent to. It is the same function. So if we do it well we get a lot of value.

[TallTed]

Apple has a guiding principle of minimizing the chance of data loss. This leads to confirmations of trashing large folders, among other things. It's sort of like rm -rf vs rm -r vs rm. Theoretically, people would only use the -r after being warned that the targeted filepath is a non-empty directory. Equally theoretically, people would only use the -f after being told that something within that filepath is protected against deletion. In practice, people tend to go straight to rm -rf because they would never accidentally try to delete a directory holding vital information ... until they do.