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Nine Things You Should Know About Nautilus
lessthan0 writes "The Nautilus program in GNOME is not only the default file manager, it creates and manages the desktop. While it looks simple on the surface, there is a lot of hidden power under the shell. The latest version of Nautilus is 2.14.0, which is included in Fedora Core 5. article covers a few non-obvious things about how Nautilus works."
Nine things I should know ? Sorry but there's only one thing I know about Nautilus and that's that I can't stand using it. My reasons:
;)
1 The whole Spatial browsing idea. Yes you can turn it off (The is the first thing I do when I come across it) but it's a rotten idea. You can tell it's a rotten idea from the recent introduction of the "expanding folders" paradigm which is attempting to return "left hand " tree view functionality into the "single pane" spatial paradigm. Spatial browsing should have been left with the early MACs and the Atari, Amiga etc.
2 Poor keyboard support. My main gripe with Nautilus is that you can't navigate by pressing a key to "walk round objects whose name starts with a letter" as you can in Konqueror, Windows Explorer etc. etc. For me this makes finding files a complete pain in the arse. It's such basic obvious, useful functionality I can't believe it's missing.
3 Poor right mouse button support. Select some files and try to right click so you can select the "copy" option from the context menu. You can't. As soon as you right click then your current selection is discarded and the item nearest the mouse pointer is selected. This also has the added effect of changing the right click context menu. Great.
4 Similarly when you've got several files/directories on the clipboard and you want to paste them into a folder with a mouse click you can't. The right click once again selects an item etc. etc.
Personally I find Nautilus to be the single biggest impediment to me using Linux as my primary O/S. I run Ubuntu and for some reason Konqueror doesn't look quite right. But Nautilus sucks... it's as if the developers have never used a computer with a fully functional file manager.
And yes I have tried raising the issues on Bugzilla but my impression is that the Gnome developers aren't interested in adding functionality. They only seem to be interested in simplifying things as much as possible ("Oh that might be difficult for some users to use so we're not adding it...")
But in the time honoured tradition of open source I've given up on Nautilus and have started writing my own file manager using Mono (not being a proficient C# coder it'll take me a while) It'll probably be pretty crappy in general but it'll at least allow me to perform my file management in a sensible way.
On day the Gnome desktop will have been reduced to a single button and then you'll be happy
Ho hum, c'est la Vie.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Applications->Accessories->Text editor; Write script; Save script; Right-click->Properties; Click Permissions tab; turn on execute; Close; Double-click script.
Not everything done through the GUI has to be 100% visual. That's the whole point to combining the metaphors via nautilus scripting and actions, for example.
The point is that when working THROUGH a GUI, you can choose to use a command-line or not as you go, and for the most appropriate jobs.