Dear Community,
Historically, GNOME 2 had no established naming convention for its core apps. That naming inconsistency was later inherited by MATE DE. As a result, we have now English-named “MATE Terminal” and “Eye of Mate” as well as a pack of Spanish-named apps including “Caja”, the default file manager. I mean no offence, Perberos did a very important step making a fork which has evolved into a very pleasant and a mature DE. But now it is a more international project which deserves to be more and more polished. I’d say MATE is now one of the most user-friendly desktop environments around, and some streamlined core app naming will be an additional plus.
Nowadays, GNOME 3 developers themselves are moving in that direction (“Nautilus” is now presented as “Files”, “Evince” is presented as “Document Viewer”, etc.). I think, we also may take a look how naming issues were outmaneuvered by Linux Mint X-apps initiative and cherry pick some ideas for MATE. We now have “MATE Terminal”. Why cannot we, say, switch to “MATE Archiver” naming from “Engrampa”? It will be more clear for newcomers. I was a newcomer myself once.
The second part is about Caja exclusively. The file manager is the face of desktop environment and has to be treated as a first-class citizen. “Caja” is simply a “box” in Spanish. What about making a small discussion about a potential new bright name for MATE file manager? I’d propose “Calabash” as a new name. Calabash is used as a container for mate, so it is a “shell” of some sort (and has a beloved “sh” suffix!). So it keeps the tradition of Nautilus: semantically the file manager name has to be related to a shell somehow.
I understand, that it may already be too late to make such changes from a maintainer’s point of view. Nevertheless, I want to plant this idea here to see the opinions of our Community members.
Cheers,
Alexey