Manipulating Inventory

Not being able to find a skirt I wanted to wear finally nudged me to start organizing my inventory... and it's proving to be a major pain.

One can have two inventory windows open, which helps a lot, but as I started a first cut of moving clothing into the "Clothing" folder, things got hairy. As I dragged cargo towards the destination window, folders would open there that I didn't want to open, things would change about the display that I didn't want to change--I wanted it to remain the way it was so I could accurately hit the destination folder and dropped things into it! I'm not sure exactly where some of my clothing wound up.

It finally occurred to me that this is yet another example of NIH. Your inventory is effectively a file system, and people have known how to access file systems across a network for a long time. There's NFS, Samba, and nowadays all those interfaces for cloud-based backups.

If you use a computer, one of the first things you learned was how to manipulate files--move them from one directory folder to another, copy them, and delete them. You have your favorite way to do so, be it via a command line, Windows Explorer, some Norton Commander-like program, Nautilus, Thunar, Konqueror, or whatever. You're familiar with it, and you probably prefer it... but the only option Second Life gives you that I've found is its in-world inventory window, requiring all the overhead of a 3-D world viewer so you can do the moral equivalent of

$ mv *Pixel\ Dolls* Clothing

So... please, LL, set up an interface that lets us access our own inventory using the interface of our choice. If we copy one of our files to it, charge us L$10. If we're the creator of an object, let us read it or copy it so we can back it up. Samba's probably the way to go, since necessity has meant everybody has to hold their noses and be able to access Windows file systems.

UPDATE: SVC-7188 is the place to look to see whether anything comes of this idea (and to vote for it or, more importantly, follow it if you wish it to be acted on).

UPDATE: Even if nothing comes of the JIRA entry, I can seriously recommend Radegast for this kind of usage. Right now, I'm not to the point of taking pictures, so I'm using the official, text-only flavor, and my graphics card is very happy to not be flogged heavily while I'm doing nothing but move stuff from one folder to another. Once I want to take pictures, I may well give the experimental version of Radegast that does render one's surroundings a shot. That said, I can't help imagining myself as Radegast pulls down my inventory standing there more or less immobile and unaware of my surroundings.