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."

Comments

Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

The most useful feature of Nautilus is the scripts functionality, so simple & elegant.

I have a lot of iso cdrom images, that I use occasionally - I popped the iso mount script in my ~/.gnome/nautilus-scripts & off I went, merilly mounting & using iso files.

I looked for equivilant functionality under windows recently & just couldn't find it - this microsoft app wouldn't mount (map, whatever you whacky windows guys call it) lots of my isos, rar was nagware (and required you to extract, rather then giving you a virtual drive), nero's expensive, etc etc.

Anyway, back on topic - go download Nautilus scripts from g-script they've got loads of scripts, which solve a lot of problems in a very unixy way. All in all, handy.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[D4rk Fx]

Daemon Tools is what you're looking for, for mounting ISOs in windows.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Dr. Evil]

Do you mean like Daemon Tools? http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/download.php

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Daemon Tools is what you're looking for, for mounting ISOs in windows.

I tried Daemon Tools - but didn't like it because:

1) It bundles ad-ware.
2) It's hard to uninstall.
3) You have a limited number of ISOs you can have mounted.
4) There's rumours of spyware

(and frankly the fourth one applies to virtual all closed source software that doesn't come from MS or Apple).

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[bombadillo]

OS X can mount ISO's out of the box. Perhaps Nautilus should include the ISO mounting script with their distro....

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Lovepump]

1. It doesn't - at least the last version I installed (3 months ago, I guess) doesn't.
2. It uninstalls in exactly the same way as every other Windows application - via Add/Remove programs.
3. It creates a virtual CD-drive and mounts the image under each one. You can have up to 4.
4. I've never heard of these rumours, so I can't really comment. I do know I've been using it for the last 4 or 5 years without any spyware, adware, trojans, etc.

I suspect that the rumours of spyware and ad-ware comes from the people who are using it to mount ISO's of games which have had little 'surprises' installed by some distribution site before it's released to the masses clamouring for a pirated copy of Doom4 or some other such shite.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[gimpimp]

double clicking an iso will open it as a directory view.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

OS X can mount ISO's out of the box. Perhaps Nautilus should include the ISO mounting script with their distro.

1) Nautilus is not a distro.
2) All linux distros can mount ISOs out of the box
3) The Nautilus script is a pretty front end to mount, just like OS X (presumably) has a pretty front end to hdiutil (I'm not near a mac machine so I can't check)
4) Thanks for piping up about OS X in a discussion comparing linux to windows! Perhaps you deserve my username more then I do?

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[everphilski]

1) no it does not. Unless you downloaded it from an unofficial site. (Official site: here
2) use the control panel. I used it for 1 day at work to install Microsoft SDK and it removed cleanly
3) Limited by the operating system (IIRC). I know I've had at least 4 going at once
4) None whatsoever

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Neoprofin]

The adware in deamon tools is opt-in volountary last I had seen it.

They also have one of the most active support forums I've ever seen.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[NSIM]

> I looked for equivilant functionality under windows recently & just couldn't find it Check out http://www.gratis-webserver.de/ClonyPage/2.html seems to work pretty well.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Anonymous Coward]

I modded you Informative. Someone had modded you redundant and I can't see how redundant applies when these two posts about Daemon Tools are only a minute or two apart. More likely you were typing when the other poster submitted theirs.

Thanks for the info!

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

1. It doesn't - at least the last version I installed (3 months ago, I guess) doesn't.

Quoting from wikipedia:

DAEMON Tools is currently being developed and distributed by DAEMON's Home and is free for non-commercial purposes. Version 4 of DAEMON Tools is bundled with WhenU software, which is spyware.

This only happened recently (4.x series), but I think it was longer then four months ago.

2. It uninstalls in exactly the same way as every other Windows application - via Add/Remove programs.

Yes, but I had an image mounted (under a different user) & it did not uninstall correctly, but removed itself from the Add/Remove programs list. I eventually had to reghack & delete the binaries to get rid of it.

3. It creates a virtual CD-drive and mounts the image under each one. You can have up to 4.

Yes, I know. Thats why I said You have a limited number of ISOs you can have mounted. I need up to twelve.

4. I've never heard of these rumours, so I can't really comment. I do know I've been using it for the last 4 or 5 years without any spyware, adware, trojans, etc.

Yes, its only in the 4.x series (and you don't have to install it, but I don't trust a company that bundles whenU)

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[gid]

I have daemon tools 4.03H installed and spybot's showing nothing... doing a google search mentions something about a search bar that's bundled with DT, but it's a very simple process to uncheck the box during the install process. I certainly didn't install it.

I personally have never wanted more than one or two images mounted. I just use it so I don't have to play discjockey when I want to play a game. I guess I never found selecting a different image every now and then a big deal.

I don't think I've uninstalled it that much--maybe once before and upgrade... I don't ever remember having a problem.

I've always considered daemon tools one of the great "free" utilities out there.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

The adware in deamon tools is opt-in volountary last I had seen it.

No - its included by default - you have to opt-out

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said, the scripting is truly handy. I use to do much photography. I created scripts to rotate,scale etc. using xdialog if any user input was needed. One of the most handy scripts I made was one that creates a gallery, making the thumbnails/html etc. I'd just selected the photos I wanted in that gallery then right click, much faster than first moving the files I wanted to a tmp dir.

I truly wish MS had some sort of scripting like this, however I can see how it would/could be abused from the word go due to the overall security model. I'm using winXp right now due to certain music software, as this machine is on it's last legs, perhaps a compromise would be a intel mac triboot? Then I could praise/mock all three systems at once.

Long live Nautilus. -_-

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Neoprofin]

Shows how much schooling has destroyed my memory. Either way, it's a simple check box during installation.(As of 4.03 anyway)

Not to get it confused with other notable "opt-out" programs like CD clubs or microsoft error reporting.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing more pathetic then someone replying anonymously to their own posts complaining about moderation.

Redundant is a fair mod for the GP. Regardless of the author's intent, it's repeating information.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Indeed, it is simple - but I never reccommend software that comes bundled with 'opt out' spyware. It may not stay opt out forever.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Actually it does, you just have to uncheck the box in the list of setup stuff.
2) Yes, it uninstalls fine, and if you have troubles there is a manual uninstall on their website
3) Yes, up to 4.
4) None other than the searchbar you uncheck.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[ivan256]

Not only don't you have to install it, but it's not installed by default. You have to check the box, and they explain that it's ad-ware before you do.

There isn't anything better out there for free. There isn't anything better out there for pay either, if you want the copy protection emulation.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I've pretty much answered your rebuttal already (as your points are identical to another poster). But anyway:

1) no it does not. Unless you downloaded it from an unofficial site. (Official site: here [daemon-tools.cc]

Incorrect - see the official site you linked to (try searching for whenu

2) use the control panel. I used it for 1 day at work to install Microsoft SDK and it removed cleanly

Oh? The control panel. Thanks for that - I would never have thought of that.

3) Limited by the operating system (IIRC). I know I've had at least 4 going at once

*sighs* no - limited by daemon tools to four.

4) None whatsoever

Depends on whether you think whenU is spyware or not.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Anonymous Coward]

you must be running a backup of that car repair documentation that comes on 12 cds..
naughty naughty

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but I had an image mounted (under a different user) & it did not uninstall correctly, but removed itself from the Add/Remove programs list. I eventually had to reghack & delete the binaries to get rid of it.

So you tried to uninstall a progam that was in use at the time?

I am not following you.

What is the proper thing to do in this case?

Uninstall and break the other user, or unistall for you and leave the other use functional.

Do you even know how to use a windows box or are you limited to what a Mac can do?

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Wudbaer]

By the same logic you shouldn't recommend software without spyware either, because some might be bundled in a later version. Oh, and be very careful about this so-called Open Source Software. There have been instances where criminally inclined authors decided to close later versions.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[guitaristx]

Sigh. That's what firewalls are for. Spyware is rendered useless if your firewall says, "Umm, no, you can't connect to the Internet. Aren't you a filesystem utility anyway? How naughty! No Internet for you!"

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[cortana]

If the uninstaller removes the add/remove programs entry before the uninstall completes sucessfully, it is broken.

Since re-writing Windows to enable removal of running programs is not going to happen, the uninstaller should have aborted at the first failure and rolled back the operation.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[carninja]

I haven't had any problems with alcohol 120% as far as copy protection, and you can mount up to 26 virtual drives. (as many as you have letters for, really.) You're supposed to pay for it though. Supposed to. (If you're using DT for it's copy protection emulation, I figure chances are better than not you don't have a problem with downloading software in the first place. So might as well use Alcohol?)

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, the scripts functionality is cool! I found this the other day quite by accident. Found the 'nautilus-scripts' folder and saw it was empty. While I was moving some other things around, I accidentally moved a script in there and lo and behold -- a 'Scripts' submenu appeared on my right-click menu! And underneath it was the script I just threw in there. To steal a line from Keaunu Reeves, "Whoa!"

I thought about some of things I wished Nautilus could do, and one of those was being able to edit files under /etc as root without having to launch a whole root Nautilus session. So I threw together a simple script something like this:


#!/bin/bash
gksudo "gvim $*"


and was it just like "cool!" when it worked.

I've been thinking of a gazillion more uses for this functionality.... maybe I'll try submitting some of the really cool ones to that g-scripts project on Sourceforge you mentioned.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[ivan256]

If you're using DT for it's copy protection emulation, I figure chances are better than not you don't have a problem with downloading software in the first place. So might as well use Alcohol?

That is where you'd be wrong.

Using CD emulation software doesn't make you a pirate. I started using Daemon Tools because I had a Vaio laptop with no CD drive. It was the only way I could game on it. I kept using it when I got my gaming desktop because it's just so damned convienient not to need to swap CDs. My hard drive is also a *lot* quieter than my CD-ROM drive.

I own a copy of Alcohol. Yes, I paid for it. I use it to rip, but I still use Daemon Tools to emulate. It just plain has better compatability.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[carninja]

I said "I figure chances are better than not". You're probably (unfortunately) in the minority on this one. (There's really no way to check, is there?)

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Anonymous Coward]

It actually only removed it form the list for that user.

Try this,

Install Deamon tools with the LOCAL administrator acount, log in to a normal user account (under XP) and mount an iso.

log in under a normal user account with admin access and remove the program.

The program disappears for the add/remove program control panel.

Log in as the normal user, your iso is there, the deamon tools icons are there, etc... Basically it works.

Log on as the LOCAL admin, deamon tools is still there to remove from the control panel. Do so.

THIS DELETES IT FOR ALL USERS.

and it unistalls fine.

I often think people accuse windows of lackin functionality because the simply don't know the proper way to admin the machien for a multi user enviornment.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[ivan256]

Maybe.

Enough people actually pay for Alcohol to keep them in business though. I doubt many people would pirate games, but then get all altruistic and pay for Alcohol.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[carninja]

thus my point.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[ShieldW0lf]

Sigh. That's what firewalls are for. Spyware is rendered useless if your firewall says, "Umm, no, you can't connect to the Internet. Aren't you a filesystem utility anyway? How naughty! No Internet for you!"

This is the modern users view of their computer. It is full of things that they don't understand, and they'd rather have some authority figure give them the illusion of safety so they can poke around oblivious than be burdened with the necessity to cultivate enough understanding to make intelligent choices. Even if they know that the authority figure is only peddling illusions, that will not sway their choice.

Kind of depressing, really...

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[baadger]

Thats a feature of Archive Roller not Nautilus

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Allnighterking]

Sorry but this isn't a nautilus feature. Oh yes you can do this using nautilus but all it really is a a short bit of code to do this

mount -o loop [ insert variable name of some.iso ]
and then point a file browser at it by iconifying the command. AKA mime types, and default actions. I can do the same thing with Konqueror, Midnight Commander, Rox File Manager, Krusador and more. Yes Windows can't do this. Windows doesn't have by default a loopback mount system. However programs for windows have provided overly inept versions of this, often at huge prices.

The only real damage here is glorifying nautilus as if it where something new and exiciting when in fact it's not really that different from all of it' peers. The article is good yes. However to be touted on /. as a new and extremely innovative approach is both incorrect and voraciously inaccurate.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[trib4lmaniac]

7-zip can unzip ISO's like a standard archive, no need to mount at all!
I think it's a new feature so you might need to grab a recent beta.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[Anonymous Coward]

In your ignorance, you truly live up to your idiotic screen name.

Re:Skip to Eight: Nautilus Scripts

[XenMantra]

This works on XP and Server.
Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP

I said it before and I'll say it again

[bogie]

Dam you Eazel! Dam you to Hell!

Re:I said it before and I'll say it again

[From A Far Away Land]

For the mods:
"Nautilus has something of a colorful past. It was created by a company called Eazel, staffed by ex-Apple programmers that wanted to bring ease of use to the Linux desktop."

I have a touch of old-fogeyism in me, and wish that Linux's file system GUI management tools were all standardized and work as simply as My Computer/Explorer do. But the horrible XP search can be replaced with anything ;-)

Re:I said it before and I'll say it again

[kfg]

I have a touch of old-fogeyism in me, and wish that Linux's file system GUI management tools were all standardized and work as simply as My Computer/Explorer do.

I have a touch of old-fogeyism in me. What the hell is a GUI and why would I want to manage it from the file system?

Also, if Your Computer works so simply, what are you bitching about?

KFG

Fvwm2 forever!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nautilus also sucks all the performance out of your computer.

Still sucks...

[Anonymous Coward]

in terms of functionality and ease of use compared to Konqueror.

10

[minus_273]

It was made by a company that tried to make money while still giving it out for free. It went under (i wonder why).

Re:10

[minus_273]

troll? hello? Eazel made natilus and went under immediatly after 1.0 was released.

One thing you should know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's really slow !!!

Re:One thing you should know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not flamebait you motherfuckers. Nautilus IS fucking slow.

And my comment in this discussion was deleted? I'll try to say it again:

Nautilus is DUMB. Nautilus is SLOW.

GNOME is getting dumber and dumber with every single release. GTK file chooser sucks and Nautilus also sucks. It does not have an address bar (CTRL-l is not a real address bar, you know, some people want to browse down the file system and then COPY the current path from the address bar. You can *not* do that in Nautilius....

Grrrr, stupid Nautilus. A dumb tool for dumb people.

Gnome Usability Team. My ass. Gnome moron usability team.

Re:One thing you should know ...

[jusdisgi]

Oh, ok, fine...I'll take the bait.

Mostly because I don't think this guy is actually flamebait. I recall when Nautilus was first added to Gnome, and I was extremely pissed about it. In fact, I'd say that was the low point in my opinion of Gnome...the file manager was slow as hell, and like Explorer on Winders it was the basis for drawing a bunch of the Gnome "stuff" like panels and whatnot, so when you had a Nautilus problem you had a total desktop problem. In short, it was pretty, but otherwise sucked. I used KDE.

But those days are over.

Nautilus these days does not seem slow at all. Particularly in comparison to Konqueror on the hardware I use both of them on. I feel strongly that the speed of Gnome has improved markedly in the last year or two, in particular the boost with this last release. The spatial file manager (once you change the gconf key to make it not litter your desktop with old windows) is killer, and irrespective of speed the functionality is excellent. I expect you simply haven't used Gnome/Nautilus recently enough; please, take another look and see if things haven't improved.

Kan it run in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

I use KDE you insensitive clod...

Re:Kan it run in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean "insensitive klod"?

Re:Kan it run in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

being a Mac fanboi it should be iNsensitive klod, you iNsensitive klod!

As a long-time GNOME user...

[Black Parrot]

The only thing I've ever bothered to learn about Nautilus is how to disable it after every upgrade.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[stevewahl]

The only thing I've ever bothered to learn about Nautilus is how to disable it after every upgrade.

Exactly!

What are these file explorer / desktop things for, anyway? A shell window with cd, ls, tab completion, and wildcards usually gets me where I want to be faster, and when I want to look at the file tree in a more "browsing" fashion, I use dirmode in EMACS.

Now I'll go back and RTFA, but if anyone who uses the tools I mention switches to using Nautilus (or similar) for some particular task they find easier there, I'd love to hear about it. Seriously, if I'm missing something, I want to know.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[BenjyD]

I'd like to see you select the correct jpeg out of a directory of 500 without an icon preview.

Using a GUI also takes less learning and less mental effort. I'd be intersted to see actual timed comparisons of the two as well, I've read that command line users often think they are being quicker than GUI users, but acutally aren't because of the way the brain senses time.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[Neoprofin]

Not to mention that you can use a mouse effectively with one hand while laying down. I'm not saying people can't type one handed, but I think the performance hit is a little greater. I'm a lazy man and sometimes I need to stretch out for six hours at a time.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, not sure if its for you, but as far as file managers go, i think the best are: emelfm, rox, and worker.

emelfm (or emelfm2 if you use gtk2) is fast and speedy, contains a builtin console (but you have to use the line input widget to tell it things, i only used it to see whet mplayer crashed), good if you want to use your shell scripts as buttons.

rox, well, thats face it, its another desktop file manager, but at least its not a windows/mac wannabe. Its actual fast, unlike konquer/natilus. The screen layout is also nice, unlike emelfm and worker, its not for command line users to much, but it is fast and simple to use for people that need a simple gui file manager.

worker, thats face it, its the uglyest thing youll ever see. But, once you get around its limited themeability, and strange widget set, youll see its quite fast, and configurable, and, best of all, unlike every other gui file manager for linux i seen, its the only one that can run a file based on its type, and not its name/extention (altho it can also use its name, if you like). I use worker myself, as it gets the job done, and i have LOTS of files that dont have extentions, so the other file managers just cant cut it for me.

All in all, those are the three best gui file managers i used, all are speedy and light.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[stevewahl]

I'd like to see you select the correct jpeg out of a directory of 500 without an icon preview.

That is something I don't do very often, and when I do I use FireFox pointing at my html photo album.

I think what an individual's common activites are may have a lot to bear on this. I'm much more likely to search for a text string in a tree of source code than search for a particular .jpg in a single directory of 500.

e.g. emacs [M-x grep-find "what I'm looking for"] which runs "find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -e grep -n -e "what I'm looking for". (Is there an easy way to do that in the typical GUI file browser?)

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[BenjyD]

Selecting pictures or movies out of a directory is something I (and I imagine many other people) do all the time. As for your search example, I think most people just use a decent text editor that has that funcionality built in, without relying on arcane command line commands. Textmate has find in project, jEdit has hypersearch and all sorts of options, even SCiTE does find in directory.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ones a tractor and the other is a race car. They both get you from point a to point be, but you can't tow jack shit with a race car, and you can't drive around a corner at 60mph in a tractor. I'd like to see you rename a mix of 500 files that start with a c and f with different names to file1.jpg, file2.jpg And yes I do just that sort of thing quite often.

I use Konqorer myself now that I've simplified it quite a bit. I've also used a lot of different GUI file type explorers on many systems, but personally I feel that it could be done a lot better. I'm not saying the CLI shell is better, but in certain scarios it certainly is - and some definatly not.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[ookaze]

I'd like to see you select the correct jpeg out of a directory of 500 without an icon preview.
Using a GUI also takes less learning and less mental effort. I'd be intersted to see actual timed comparisons of the two as well, I've read that command line users often think they are being quicker than GUI users, but acutally aren't because of the way the brain senses time

I hope you don't really believe such BS.
Because you chose one specific application that is faster with a GUI does not mean what you say after that is true.
Try renaming these 500 same jpegs to a formatted pattern, and I can assure you that's not your brain that distorts the time then, when making your script in 30 seconds, and the script executing for 10. Doing the same with a GUI would take hours.
I used to do this for MP3 files, I've just done sth similar yesterday, transforming some sequences in a lot of (more than 1500) XML files with a sed.
Between doing it by hand (which is error prone) and making the script, it was a no brainer.
Just because the GP says BS, does not mean the opposite BS is true.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[BenjyD]

I know there are situations where having a programming language available is useful, I've done it myself. That is a different application, however, and you can always launch a terminal window in the current dir using a Nautilus action if you need that.

The GP was apparently only talking about situations using cd, ls etc. I wish I could find the report I read about the command line vs GUI timings.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[peragrin]

With proper naming done for those images it's not hard at all. I even have scripts that add to the begining and end of filenames(before ext's) so I can name them all quickly and then move them to the mass storage directory.

A gui is faster for some items, but a commandline is faster for most tasks. With KDE I usually create a transparent Konsole window the half the size of the desktop for running those commands. With OS X I have a hotkey toggling iTerm to either open or close a terminal window.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[ajs]

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.

Re: As a long-time GNOME user...

[Black Parrot]

> I'd like to see you select the correct jpeg out of a directory of 500 without an icon preview.

There are plenty of applications you can use to browse your pjorn. You don't need something that poops all over your desktop.

Re: As a long-time GNOME user...

[Black Parrot]

> Using a GUI also takes less learning and less mental effort.

It depends on what you do. If you only do one thing with your computer, all you need is a power switch. If you're a power user you probably find a command line more effective than a GUI. On those rare occasions that I use Windows I'm often annoyed by having to click through a dozen menus, tabs, and pop-ups to reach something that I can get within half a second by typing a few characters on my shell command line.

Also, most CLIs are Turing complete. I can do amazing things by typing a complex instruction at the command line and walking away from it.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[stevewahl]

I need to be less adversarial here. The command line is what I use because it's what I know. Let's say I'm always looking to add to my bag of tools, and if there are times when using Nautilus or some other GUI file manager would be better for me, or Joe shell user, I'd like to know what you (all of you) think they might be, so I can try it and decide for myself.

Could we re-cast my previous reply in a different light? "Finding the right picture in a pile of 500? Hey, I do use a GUI for that, it's just Firefox + a photo album, not Nautilus. Any other examples?"

Someone mentioned automatically opening up a shell in the directory that you're looking at in the browser. (I REALLY have wanted that on windows occasionally -- does it exist there?) It occurs to me that it'd be really usefull (for me) if a gui filemanager could put the pathnames of the file(s) I click on in the cut/paste buffer so I can paste them into a shell window, or maybe drag & drop into the shell window. (Usually when I think of a good idea like this, it's already there and I just didn't know about it. Feel free to rub it in if that's the case!)

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[Saganaga]

Someone mentioned automatically opening up a shell in the directory that you're looking at in the browser. (I REALLY have wanted that on windows occasionally -- does it exist there?)

The Windows XP Power Toy "Open Command Window Here" does that nicely; downloadable from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/power toys/xppowertoys.mspx.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[g2devi]

Actually, you don't have to use SED. Unix has a "rename" command that accommodates SED expression renames. It's a real godsent, so if you don't have it installed on your distro, do yourself a favour and use this PERL replacement:
        http://www.greenfly.org/rename

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[Narishma]

Do you know about Yakuake ?

It's like the Quake console, you invoke it with a shortcut (by default it's F12 but you can change it) and it slides from the top of the screen. You can make it transparent too. And it has tabs.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[Iron Condor]

I'd like to see you select the correct jpeg out of a directory of 500 without an icon preview.

One may be possible, but try to copy those images from the 500 you took on vacation that had the dog in them. Hah. I'm very much a console-guy myself, but there's definitely tasks where a gui pays.

I've read that command line users often think they are being quicker than GUI users, but acutally aren't because of the way the brain senses time.

Simple really: the more you're concentrating on doing something, the less you notice the passing of time. Same thing for car drivers (who always underestimate how long it takes to go from one place to another) vs. users of public transit (who have nothing to do during the transit and routinely overestimate how long a trip takes). That's been well-studied since the sixties at least (i.e. since before computers were a routine tool).

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[BenjyD]

I just tried it out, and Mac OS X pastes the pathname if you drag a file into a terminal window. I think Nautilus does something similar, or you can put a script in your nautilus-scripts directory that will open a terminal window in the current directory (google for nautilus scripts, I think there is a giant repository somewhere).

I use the CLI a lot (currently have 7 terms open), I just don't like to dismiss the GUI so much.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[gnud]

After some quick testing, I found that both GNOME-terminal and konsole supports drag-and-drop into the shell window. Gnome terminal just pastes the filename, konsole lets you choose between pasting the name, and some common commands.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[sp0rk173]

Sometimes I like to give my fingers a rest, you know? Just sit back and pretend it's a point and click computer for an hour or two. I also like looking at thumbnails in a photo collection, they're always pretty. I'm usually 20-80 with my nautilus/terminal use. 20% of the time i'm looking at the filesystem through nautlus, 80% i'm using the terminal. It's just nice to have the option to not constantly cd through directories.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[Blakey Rat]

You make it sound as if you can't run scripts with a GUI file manager. But, uh, you're wrong-- you can. Even Windows Explorer has VBScript, even though I hear it's pretty clunky. Apple's OS X has AppleScript which has a nice record-and-playback feature you can use if you're not entirely sure how to type the script in, and Nautilus has the scripting feature discussed in this article.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[SparkEE]

Cygwin terminal supports drag-and-drop of filenames into the shell window.

Re:As a long-time GNOME user...

[zsau]

Actually, I find ROX-Filer a great complement to the command line, given it contains a built-in "minibuffer" which you can use to run a command-line script optionally with the current selection as its arguments. In addition, it also supports running files based on their type (by default it uses magic to detect the type, but you can override that by setting a MIME-Type extended attribute if your file system supports it). I'm pretty sure more file managers besides ROX-Filer and Worker do that.

Oh I'm well aware

[GigsVT]

I hate it when I turn off that Nautilus crap, I lose my desktop background every restart. Have to manually set it with the desktop background tool every restart, so I know Nautilus doesn't need to run for it to get set, they were just lazy.

Re:Oh I'm well aware

[clydemaxwell]

Run the background setter in your .xsession? This is a reasonable approximation of what the nautilus 'crap' does anyway. And for those of us in fluxbox, this is what we do by default. 'fbsetbg -l'

Re:Oh I'm well aware

[duffbeer23]

Actually, what I think you're running into (because it's happened to me) is that nautilus is attempting to run on your desktop as well. Run nautilus with the "--no-desktop" param and you'll be good. I use enlightenment for my desktop manager but nautilus works when I need it.

Re:Oh I'm well aware

[HaydnH]

Nautilus controls the desktop aswell as being a file manager. If you just want the file manager use "nautilus --no-desktop", alternatively set GConf, see this post.

Re:Oh I'm well aware

[GigsVT]

You don't understand. I don't want to run nautilus. Period. I just want the other parts of Gnome.

bah

[binford2k]

What a waste of an article. I was hoping to find something new and interesting.

Re:bah

[tchernobog]

Yes, it's very basic, targeted mostly at newbies. However, bringing also these articles to the attention of the masses isn't inherently bad. There could be always new ./ visitors who can benefit from a simple tutorial about a (for some of us) well known feature which is obscure to them, or people that can point out a simple article like this to a not-so-tech-savvy friend of theirs.

I would rather complain about the increasingly frequent Slashdot dupes and karma-pumping tabloid stories than these articles (although I admit a less "epic" title from the editor would have been preferred).

GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[facelessnumber]

I think Nautilus is cool for what it is, but it was a lot cooler before we got sent on a trip back to 1995 with the infuriating "spatial" default mode. I think that was the nail in GNOME's coffin for me personally. And when they did that, it also coincided with the release of KDE 3.2, which (imho) finally brought Konqueror to a mature enough state to use as a browser. It was already a kickass file manager, and the main reason for that, aside from its file system transparency, (kioslaves - FTP, NFS, SMB, SSH... All treated just like a folder on a hard drive, and now in tabs too!) is that it doesn't make assumptions about my intelligence. It's built to be simple enough for the majority of users, yet manages not to compromise any of its convenience and power for more advanced users. I really hate it when a tool I like gets dumbed-down for the masses and becomes less functional for me. I used to be a GNOME guy, but because of the very counter-productive "usability" campaign and mass removal/hiding of features, 2.4 was the last great GNOME and everything since then (while I was still bothering to look) has sucked. Konqueror owns Nautlius, and only the rate at which KDE improves its feature set can match the rate at which GNOME reduces theirs. It's really quite sad, 'cause I used to love GNOME.

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really quite sad, 'cause I used to love GNOME.

Did you ever really love GNOME? Judging from your comment history, you seem to be promoting KDE rather frequently. I am not saying that you are a KDE troll, but at least some of your comments look suspicious.

Anyway, I have hated Nautilus since GNOME 2.0 and I ended up disabling it after every upgrade. But now that I am using GNOME 2.14, I kind of like Nautilus. It is reasonably fast, not intrusive and rather convenient to use. Contrary to some users here, I like the spatial mode. Of course I still use the command line for some tasks, but Nautilus has a lot of nice features that make using it more efficient than using the command line (for many tasks, but not all yet).

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop writing such a nonsense. Nothing forces you to use the spatial mode. You can switch the behaviour on and off by clicking on the preferences menu.

Anyway for 99% of all new users spatial mode is the best option.

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[ramunasg]

I think they got the right joice, then they switched to the spatial interface. It looks very clean and pleasent and you can consentrate on the subject - the files.

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[Bastian]

What's so horrible about having to click a checkbox to make Nautilus not be spatial anymore? Or is browser mode also an example of everything that is and ever has been wrong with the computing industry?

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you try changing the option to "browser" mode? I know, I know, it'd be nice for it to be the default, but technically, it has not been dumbed down. You don't need to be stuck in the spatial world. I sure don't. (and yes I will add my voice to those calling onto the GNOME guys to change the default... though I guess any distro maintainer can do it too)

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnone is reborn for me and the reason is Ubuntu. Even with Gnome's quirks, Ubuntu is great because mostly everything just works. Of course there is also Kubuntu, but the time and effort spent on that distro seems to be considerably less compared to Ubuntu and it shows.

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[someone300]

You know GNOME supports something like kioslaves: GNOME-VFS. SFTP, FTP, CDDA, HTTP, DAV and many other things (apparently on the fly decompression too but I don't know how that works or if that works -- file roller sucks).

I agree in that Konqueror is likely more powerful than Nautilus, however, I very rarely find the need to use many of Konqueror's features, despite being quite a heavy computer user/programmer - most just confuse me or distract me. For anything that requires ungodly amounts of file operations, a quick "Open shell here" and small bash one-liner will often be quicker IMO (yes I find bash less confusing than Konqueror ;))

That said, there is great potential for ease of use and usability in the KDE project, I feel that their UIs could just do with a bit of polish. I find they always have the impression of being tacky, where they do what you want, and you can find most of the features, but it's a bit messy and takes longer to get used to and use than it should.

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[facelessnumber]

Did you ever really love GNOME? Judging from your comment history, you seem to be promoting KDE rather frequently. I am not saying that you are a KDE troll, but at least some of your comments look suspicious.

Really, I did love GNOME. I felt like KDE was too bloated, GNOME seemed faster, didn't load me down with stuff I'd never use. And KDE frankly was the gayest looking thing I'd ever seen with it's old default "Keramik" theme and putrid default colors. Thankfully somebody recognized this, and you may or may not like Plastik or Lipstik, but I think it beats the old stuff. No, GNOME was clean and polished at 2.4, KDE was buggy and all fluff at 3.1. The reason you don't see me embracing GNOME in my comment history is that I fully defected to KDE with the release of GNOME 2.6 a couple of years ago. Really it seemed like GNOME just kept getting worse while each thing I didn't like about KDE got fixed. I'm really picky about having an optimal user interface tailored to my habits and needs, and KDE has infinitely configurable behavior. GNOME seems afraid that configurability, versatile UI's and usable file dialogs, will somehow confuse and frighten their users... But come on... These are Linux users. Most of these people are somewhat technical, or at least interested in computers enough to have installed their own operating system. There are exceptions, but for the most part a person with linux on their computer has USED a friggin' computer before and does not need his or her hand held to that degree. People don't switch to Linux for the same reason they switch to Mac. A typical Linux user didn't become one because Windows wasn't easy enough to use and he was afraid of viruses. He switched because he wanted to do more with his computer and the learning curve didn't scare him. That guy is well past the "problems" that GNOME started addressing after 2.4.

Every time I'd upgrade GNOME, I'd comb the system hunting down ways to re-enable what they took out. New features were scarce and it was all about gutting the ones it had. When I install a new KDE, I eagerly comb the system looking for features and improvements and I'm never disappointed. There for a while I was expecting Clippy to show up in the next version of GNOME, but

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[caseih]

Definitely KDE's io-slaves are very good. Gnome does have the gnome-vfs subsystem, which in theory provides a similar function, but just seems to be lacking any real, useful functionality. I have yet to see gnome-vfs used the way most KDE users depend on io-slaves. There's not even a working fish:/// protocol. There is sftp:/// but I would find fish more useful as it works with servers that may not have sftp working; all it needs is shell access. However, both io-slaves and gnome-vfs have a fatal flaw in that they only are available to apps who know about them (IE linked to the KDE or Gnome libraries). There are a myriad of usability issues to overcome to make this kind of io layer work at the lower levels where all apps could benefit, however. So it is a tough issue. I have used a hack that used fuse to mount a kde io-slave url to a folder that anyone could access. It worked most of the time, but required an X11 connection to display the password dialog boxes.

Since spacial browsing is optional, I don't think that this alone is a valid reason to disparage Nautilus. The tired old argument against Gnome for having reasonable, simple defaults doesn't really fly either. It's all a matter of personal preference. Your need to micromanage the UI doesn't mean that all users want to micromange the UI anymore than my preference of sane defaults that I never have to tweak means everyone should also have the same preference. I don't find either Konqueror or Nautilus to be that useful to me period. My favorite file managers are the bash shell and the venerable Midnight Commander.

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[nutshell42]

You know GNOME supports something like kioslaves: GNOME-VFS. SFTP, FTP, CDDA, HTTP, DAV and many other things (apparently on the fly decompression too but I don't know how that works or if that works -- file roller sucks).

But I don't think it's as well integrated as kio-slaves. Correct me if I'm wrong but I remember that in one of the Gnome 2.14 new-features articles we had on /. they mentioned that gedit now supports opening ftp etc like local files.

This implies that Gnome-VFS has to be integrated seperately in every app while I can use kio-slaves in every input field that accepts uri's in every app that uses the kdelibs.

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[facelessnumber]

Spatial mode was just one of many nails. The file dialog changes were another big one. The whole spatial really thing breaks down when I want to move to a place several directories up or down. Opening a bunch of new windows does not help usability in my opinion, and I think a lot of people would agree with me, since the tabs in Firefox are wildly popular even to the point that the next IE will have them.

The address bar being gone by default from Nautilus and the file dialogs is also infuriating. What if I don't want to take my hands of the keyboard and click a mouse a bunch of times times, scrolling and closing windows behind me all the while when I could have gone to the address bar and typed "/etc/httpd/conf" in about four keystrokes with auto-completion? I'm sorry if that means people have to learn something to take advantage of it, but why remove it when it works so much better for the people who have a little practice?

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[ambrosius27]

The location bar is still available. Without taking your hands off the keyboard, press control+ L and start typing the location you want. Or, (again without taking your hands off the keyboard), type the location starting with the root '/'. In both cases, the address bar magically pops up and is highlighted for text entry.

In the newest GTK+, there will also be a button next to the path bar, which, when pushed, will open up a location bar. This new button will make the whole location bar a bit more discoverable, fortunately.

In any case, to address your complaint: in Nautilus (and in any GTK+ application using the standard file dialogues), you can get to the location bar without clicking on the mouse.

Cheers!

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[someone300]

Well it's a bit more complicated than this. Technically, an application that wants to be able to use GNOME-VFS has to use the GNOME-VFS functions instead of the stdio functions (obviously), but since GTK+ is cross platform (e.g. the GIMP), but GNOME-VFS isn't enabled automatically, rather an app needs to initialise that library.

It's very simple to do and aside from that, GTK can be fully integrated with GNOME-VFS, but it actually requires, like kioslaves, that you don't use stdio. A significant number of applications are written using only GTK and none of the GNOME libraries. I'd consider any program in the GNOME platform not working with GNOME-VFS as buggy or inconsistent behaviour.

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[mz2]

Nah, you're trolling... You definitely should have a look at Nautilus in 2.14. Integrated searching (including Beagle if available) is hardly an example of reducing feature set in relation to Konqueror, for example. Or for example network browsing and other gnome-vfs goodies are only getting better. Burning CDs/DVDs is extremely easy, drag'n'drop works beautifully across different GNOME apps etc. Or how about regular expression based matching with ctrl+S (which has been around for ages). Also, the spatial mode hasn't been the default since 2.12 at least in Ubuntu, thank god. I personally fail to see compromises for "the masses" or dumbening down in current GNOME releases -- quite the contrary I find the GNOME people are very clearly on the ball in terms of providing power users what the want (Nautilus scripts for example being one nice example), as well as accommodating those who just need the thing to work easily.

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[facelessnumber]

Yes, like most of GNOME's new obstacles, there are workarounds. I knew about that, but it's really not good enough. I don't mind so much that it's a non-obvious solution. If something like that bugs me enough I will research it and once I've learned it, I've learned it. The extra step bugs me, and the overall reduced functionality bugs me. That location bar is better than nothing, but it still sucks. It behaves in an unintuitive way all its own. Example, start typing a location, then get halfway through it and press the down arrow a couple of times like you've been conditioned to do by every single other app that has that type of input method. Nothing. That means you have to remember the path or at least the first few letters of everything. Have to remember whether or not that name is capitalized, etc. So you just press enter halfway through what you were doing, find the right name, and either click, click, click, click or press ctrl-L again to get back to what you were doing. Why did they do that? Sometimes I think they do weird crap like that just to be different, not better... Stuff like swapping the OK and Cancel buttons around on everything. What purpose could that have possibly served? Standardize the apps, sure, but at least look to the de facto. Software should stand apart from the herd because it's better, not because its UI guidelines are completely different just for the sake of being different.

At least they got their branding down. I definitely know a GNOME-ism when I see it. The one big, black mark on Kubuntu is all of that GNOME weirdness that filtered down into the Firefox package.

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[facelessnumber]

network browsing and other gnome-vfs goodies are only getting better.

Yes, better than they were. Took them long enough to get there, but I did notice that. Better than kioslaves? I'm dubious but I admit I don't actually know. Early gnome-vfs left a bad taste in my mouth. Oh, and how about some tabs in Nautilus so I don't have to open fifteen windows?

Burning CDs/DVDs is extremely easy

Easy if you want to do one specific thing. Frustrating as hell if you're trying to do anything other than drag a few files into a window and burn them to a disc. I like K3B a lot better. And Nautilus could really use tabbed-navigation.

drag'n'drop works beautifully across different GNOME apps

I should hope so. That is after all what this whole pointy-clicky thing is all about. Just open up a tab and... Oh, wait...

Also, the spatial mode hasn't been the default since 2.12

If that's the case, then it took them six releases to do that. What, should we give them a medal? They had it right the first time, and we have known this since Windows 95. To think of all the time they wasted when they could have been implementing tabs in Nautilus! I find the GNOME people are very clearly on the ball in terms of providing power users what the want

Admittedly, I wouldn't know. I gave up on GNOME 'long about the time Konqueror got tabs.

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[nutshell42]

Who the fuck modded the parent redundant?

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[ambrosius27]

Well, it sounds like you don't really want to give Gnome much of a chance. If it varies at all from your experience, you slam it-- even if Gnome provides other ways to do what you want it to do.

Pressing '/' or control + L is an extra step? How so? If you open up a file chooser with a location bar present, you must first click on the location bar or tab your way until it is selected. Either way will need at least one keystroke or, worse, taking your hands off the keyboard to click the mouse. On the other hand, if you press '/', then you have already started entering in the location without any preliminary keystrokes. This is actually *more* efficient. (If, for the sake of argument, the location bar is the first thing selected in the filechooser, it is simply as efficient as typing '/' to begin with. There is still no extra step.)

As you acknowledge, there is filename completion available: just start entering the name. What is so hard about that?

Gnome didn't swap the Ok and Cancel buttons. They placed the button most likely to be pushed to the edge of the window, where it is easier to be accessed. This has to do with Fitts Law. The Gnome HIG also recommends that the buttons have descriptive terms, such as "Don't Save" and "Save" rather than "Ok" and "Cancel." This isn't such a crazy idea, you know. Apple does it too, and everyone and their brother seem to think that Apple gets everything right.

The changes Gnome made were meant to make things better. You may agree or disagree whether the changes actually made things better, but if you read the mailing list archives, it becomes clear the intent was certainly good. Gnome did not make changes "just to be different."

Re:GNOME is dead to me and Nautilus is the reason.

[facelessnumber]

Oh, I'll really torch some karma if I start telling you how I feel about Apple... Anyway, not showing the location bar by default isn't the thing that bugs me so much as the way the location bar works. If the GNOME HIG stuff has really helped other people adopt it, then what few people like me that were turned off by it are inconsequential. We'll just use something else, and that's a good thing. I'm glad I have a choice. I do like GNOME a hell of a lot better than Windows or OSX though. And I certainly believe their hearts were in the right place when they started making all those changes. It's just that while their arguments make sense and their interface guidelines probably do make things intuitive for lots of people, it has quite the opposite effect on some of us who are already quite at home with all the functionality that allegedly confuses new users.

Gnome didn't swap the Ok and Cancel buttons. They placed the button most likely to be pushed to the edge of the window, where it is easier to be accessed. This has to do with Fitts Law. The Gnome HIG also recommends that the buttons have descriptive terms, such as "Don't Save" and "Save" rather than "Ok" and "Cancel." This isn't such a crazy idea, you know. Apple does it too, and everyone and their brother seem to think that Apple gets everything right.

All this stuff makes sense when you explain it, but if it has to be explained then it's hardly intuitive to me. Perhaps people smarter than I am came up with these ideas and that means I'm wrong, and when the buttons are labeled "Save" and "Don't Save" instead of "Ok" and "Cancel" it means that new users don't have to think as much. But it also means that old users have to read the buttons now. That's a small thing but it distracts me a lot more than, say, a toolbar.

I know they're trying. I have to give them credit for doing something new. And I know they're doing great things for their target audience. Their target audience just isn't me anymore.

Trash Dot

[digitaldc]

One: Adding Delete
The ~/.Trash directory is where files are moved if you delete local files. On mounted volumes, Nautilus will create a hidden .Trash-uid directory if you move a file to the trash, as long as you have the file permissions.

So will /. sue for copyright infringement? Or is it DRM? Or is it just some Trashy slander?

Re:Trash Dot

[Evangelion]

Slander and libel only apply to untrue statements.

Let's see...

[Evangelion]

1) It's slow
2) It sucks
3) Here's how you disable it...
.
.
.

Is there anything else you really need to know about it?

Re:Let's see...

[Anonymous Coward]

My point of view:
1) It's fast
2) It doesn't suck (it is actually very nice IMHO)
3) If you want to disable it, just remove it from your session, save your session and there you go! Nothing secret about that.

The only thing one has to know.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing one has to know about Nautilus is how to disable it.
Various options are available:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22disable+nautilus

9 things?

[jc87]

Is just my impression or they forgot to mention Nautilus can be also used to access a ftp ( simple yet useful )?

Re:9 things?

[Slashcrap]

Is just my impression or they forgot to mention Nautilus can be also used to access a ftp ( simple yet useful )?

Midnight Commander running in a text console can do that as well. It can also do many other things and has a distinct advantage over Nautilus in that it isn't a slow, bloated, dysfunctional piece of shit.

I think Nautilus is what put me off of GNOME many years ago. Well, that and its developers.

PS. Konqueror also does FTP and STFP. And so does any KDE app.

Re:9 things?

[Short Circuit]

I was pleasently surprised when the version I recently installed supported ssh.

Setting up an ssh daemon on my computers is much easier, and more secure, than setting up an FTP server. And more convenient than NFS or Samba.

Re:9 things?

[fistfullast33l]

SFTP support was the only reason I ever use nautilus. Now I've started to use scp from the command line as I dropped GNOME for fluxbox and later E17 long ago. Ironically, they did away with the applications:/// method of editing your Applications menu in GNOME without adding a workaround and that was the last straw.

Re:9 things?

[Short Circuit]

I know how to use scp and sftp on the command line. 90% of my time on Linux is spent in a shell. (That may change if/when I install jedit again.) I like GNOME because of its thumbnailing of pics and video, which it does better than KDE.

Re:9 things?

[WorLord]

"Ironically, they did away with the applications:/// method of editing your Applications menu in GNOME without adding a workaround and that was the last straw."

They did add a workaround. It was called "Smeg", and now "alacarte".

Re:9 things?

[Just Some Guy]

def greetings(x): if x == "friend": print "Howdy" elif x == "enemy": print "Dye motherfucker" else: print "stfu bitch"

Come on, fellow Slashdotter. That's:

def greetings(x): return {'friend': 'Howdy', 'enemy': 'Dye [sic]'}.get(x, 'g0 4w4y, l4m0r')

Remember, pardner: anonymous dicts are your friends. And way more 1337.

Next gen file manager

[gimpimp]

if you like nautilus, but you'd like something faster, smaller etc, take a look at thunar. It's the file manager for the xfce project. works well in gnome as a nautilus replacement, and where nautilus has extensions(scripts), thunar has plugins. have a look.

Re:Next gen file manager

[baadger]

Other things to note about thunar:

1) It's nowhere near as functional or customiseable as nautilus...yet
2) It's in quite early development and only ships with XFCE 4.4 beta at the moment, so isn't really the official current file manager :)
3) It's very promising.

I'm currently using Xfce 4.2.x (the current release xfce) after having a bad experience with the 4.4 beta but I have the Gnome suite installed and using Nautilus for my desktop and file manager.

Nautilus is quite heavy and uses a hefty volume of RAM, but no more so than Explorer does on Windows, as for response time it's certainly slower than other file managers but if you've got a spiffy CPU it's not an issue.

Re:Next gen file manager

[dbcad7]

I've always liked xfce, and I use it as my main window manager most of the time (although I do switch to gnome now and then). This has been needed, Rox-filer I just couldn't stand.. XFFM a little better, and at least usable. I am very glad they are putting together something new.

What I myself finaly did, was install xfe (x file explorer) which I like. The problem with xfe though, is that it will also install the fox toolkit, using up some space. When the next xfce is released I will probably trash everything and try it (probably with XFLD) stand alone for awhile.

One good tip.

[reed]

OK, that was a completely useless article.

The nautilus-scripts thing is useful however. There is a script to upload photos to flickr at http://nozell.com/blog/archives/2004/09/04/flickr- upload-for-gnomes-nautilus/ though the progress bar doesn't update right. I also made some shell scripts that resize images using 'convert' from ImageMagick to thumbnail size and webpage size (e.g. max 700 px wide).

One thing it shows though is that there is still a lot of confusing inconsistency on where Gnome-related applications store preferences and other data. IMO it should *All* be in ~/.nautilus, not scattered between there, ~/.gnome2, ~/.gtk, etc. You probably also have a ~/.gnome too for non-Gnome2 apps.

The global settings for Gnome are also scattered everywhere.

I wish they'd fix that.

Re:One good tip.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that's one of the things that annoys me about Unix in general is the dot files in the home directory. Apple got this right in that you have a "Library" folder. I wish everyone would just put everything in ~/.config/$appname or something. That way it's hidden by default, organized, and if you want it visible just symlink .config to config/

Re:One good tip.

[gnud]

Actually, it _should_ be stored in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nautilus (or perhaps $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gnome/nautilus), according to the XDG base directory spec.

Knowledge is Always a Good Thing

[eno2001]

Just a few weeks ago I posted a JE asking people what is so special about the spatial file management metaphor. Not so much because I'm bitching about it, but because I was genuinely curious about how my Slashdot friends feel. I got some good responses as well as some really good conversation going about Nautilus and GNOME. I'd been on a KDE journey (I prefer GNOME and no I don't want a flame fest both environment have their good and bad points) since November to really kick the tires and just switched back to GNOME. I decided to take the suggestions from my friends and post them in another more cohesive JE in the hopes that it would be helpful. I have to say with my new found knowledge about Nautilus plus what the article posted on the front page today reveals, I'm really enjoying Nautilus a lot these days.

Re:Knowledge is Always a Good Thing

[Slashcrap]

I have to say with my new found knowledge about Nautilus plus what the article posted on the front page today reveals, I'm really enjoying Nautilus a lot these days.

And I'm really enjoying repeatedly slamming my testicles in the refrigerator door.

It's a big change from my previous hobby of not slamming my balls in the door, but I guess that my new hobby and your love of Nautilus proves that people can get used to just about anything.

Although frankly, I think you might be a little bit weird.

Re:Knowledge is Always a Good Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

spoken like a someone who loves the cock from bill gates or steve jobs

Re:Knowledge is Always a Good Thing

[nutshell42]

1. Konsole was THE killer terminal app. Not quite where I think terminal apps should be, but nonetheless leaps and bounds over all others.

Yakuake is even better. Konsole in a Quake-like terminal that pops open when you hit F12. I always used one of my desktop for Konsole-only and was constantly switching between the different desktops. Yakuake is much better =)

The thing Gnome should learn from KDE is more flexibility. When using Gnome I constantly run into walls when I try to do something in a way Gnome doesn't want me to do it because someone decided doing it his way was "better". Gnome feels like Windows in this regard and I don't think that's a good thing.

The thing KDE should learn from Gnome is better discoverability. Having many features and lots flexibility is overwhelming for many users when you offer them five almost identically named options at once. The configuration of the kicker clock applet is imho the worst case scenario, some parts of kcontrol are almost as bad. In xine there's a dropdown where you can choose how many options you want from "Beginner" to "Master of the Known Universe". I think KDE desperatly needs something similar.

Re:Knowledge is Always a Good Thing

[gaveawaymyname]

"When using Gnome I constantly run into walls when I try to do something in a way Gnome doesn't want me to do it because someone decided doing it his way was "better". Gnome feels like Windows in this regard and I don't think that's a good thing."

I totally agree. With all the research into usability, fine, make it the default. But for fuck's sake, people have different ways of doing things.

Also, I haven't played with 2.14. Are you able to draw a selection box in Nautilus using the Detailed file view yet?

Re:Knowledge is Always a Good Thing

[mbwjr12]

Regarding your ability to show mounted volumes in the file dialogs in GNOME, you really need to discover KIO slaves. Just pick your protocol (fish:// => ssh, ftp:// => ftp, and so on), and then append the directory, and it will transparently access it. This works in all KDE apps, in all dialogs. I find it especially useful for server administration, where I often need to copy files back and forth, etc. This way, I don't need ftp running remotely, I can just ssh instead.

Re:Knowledge is Always a Good Thing

[Randle_Revar]

That reminds me, I discovered some additions to the "ctrl-l in open/save dialogs" tip. In the save dialog there is a box to type the filename, but to my surprise, you can also type a full path in that box. And in the open dialog you can just start typing a path and it will have the same effect as typing ctrl-l.

It seems like every time I find out something about Gnome/Nautilus, I like it more - or maybe hate it less. :-)

Re:Knowledge is Always a Good Thing

[Blakey Rat]

What's funny is that normally, the Slashdot crowd thinks that Microsoft software is always terrible and buggy and insecure and generally is going to cause the downfall of society.

However, when it comes to file browsing, they seem to think that Windows 95 was the golden standard by which all spatial file browsers should be measured, and say things like, "well, it should be obvious that spatial browsing is stupid because Windows 95 was so bad." And it will never occur to them that maybe the reason spatial browsing sucked in Windows 95 was because Microsoft screwed it up, not because the concept is flawed!

Of course I know the true reason: They're not going to admit that they've never used an Amiga or Macintosh pre-OS X, but they haven't and so they've never seen a good implementation of spatial browsing before.

As an OS X user, I say bring back the Finder in Mac OS 9.2.2. It was better than the OS X Finder is now in almost every single way, and I was a dozen times more efficient with it.

Re:Knowledge is Always a Good Thing

[xerxesdaphat]

OK buddy... I'm probably not the best person to comment on this (I use GNOME, but mostly use gnome-terminals with vi inside them (don't tell me to use WM or that screen thing, I like the GNOME system setup utilities and stuff)), but how is not having lots of clicky things to change your config anything like Windows?

I mean, it's like saying, ``When using mount(8) I constantly run into walls when I try to do something in a way mount doesn't want me to do it because someone decided doing it his way was "better".'' I mean, if you decide you'd rather choose the mount point first then the device to be mounted (mount /mnt/ipod /dev/sda3) instead of the normal way, how can you change that?

You know, there's a good reason that we distribute source code...

-Tommi =^_^=

nautilus-actions

[tvon]

I'm not really a big fan of anything mentioned in the article, but I love the Nautilus Actions extension:

http://www.grumz.net/node/8

In short it lets you configure context menu actions for files based on type/location/etc. It's significantly better than vanilla nautilus scripts.

Please let TFA say

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

that there's tabs or split level viewing SOMEWHERE hidden in Nautilus. I don't see how tabs go against the HIG guidelines but maybe I just don't get it.

Re:Please let TFA say

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I don't see how tabs go against the HIG guidelines but maybe I just don't get it.

Tabs would provide additional choice and hence complexity, which would make Gnome users feel scared and helpless. Hence, like an address bar, they must be shunned in Nautilus.

Having lived with an ever decreasing feature set and usability in Nautilus, and Gnome in general since FC2, I can safely say that when FC6 rolls around, I'm switching my desktop to KDE. Because if I stick with gnome in FC6, I literally won't be able to switch desktops.

Re:Please let TFA say

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

The thing is I like Gnome, specifically the OSX like layout but I hate being treated like an idiot with all of the crippled and obscure features. Is there a way to make KDE more like OS X as far as the layout?

    Any Gnome devels reading, please explain why we can't have an address bar and tabs in Nautilus!

Re:Please let TFA say

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. KDE even supports a global menu bar like OS X.

Re:Please let TFA say

[bkor]

> Tabs would provide additional choice and hence complexity, which would make Gnome users feel scared and helpless. Hence, like an address bar, they must be shunned in Nautilus.

Location bar is available within Nautilus. Tabs will be added when someone provides a patch.

Re:Please let TFA say

[Anonymous Coward]

that is not true. what shows when you press / or CTRL-l is not really an address bar. I want to be able to copy content from the address bar. How is that possible in nautilus?

GNOME is just getting dumber and dumber. And my frustration and frustration of zillions other - soon to be ex - users of GNOME is getting bigger and bigger.

Re:Please let TFA say

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Tabs will be added when someone provides a patch. In other words, never. Gnome isn't interested in tabs for Nautilus. Gnome will continue to be pushed as the default desktop of choice for every "Linux on the desktop" that fails (pretty standard in that area) while those of us who use Linux for choice and aren't afraid of tabs, address bar, etc will use KDE or Fluxbox. I predict KDE 4 will sneak up on Gnome users while Gnome is dropped from more distributions because of their tangled mss of dependancies (see Slackware).

  Too bad Gnome devels are such misguided idealists.

Re:Please let TFA say

[kyrre]

Any Gnome devels reading, please explain why we can't have an address bar in Nautilus!

Because you can? Perhapse you should try Nautilus before complaining?

Re:Please let TFA say

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

Gnome will continue to be pushed as the default desktop of choice for every "Linux on the desktop" that fails (pretty standard in that area) while those of us who use Linux for choice and aren't afraid of tabs, address bar, etc will use KDE or Fluxbox.

Speaking for others (especially with language like that) is pretty arrogant. I'm pretty much a power user and I really prefer Gnome. I can understand your POV, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't twist the truth -- some people do like to work in Gnome, and that is one of the reasons it is the default choice of several desktop-distributions (failing and flourishing ones alike).

Re:Please let TFA say

[rhendershot]

>>like an address bar,

preferences > behavior > always use text-entry location bar

With this set you'll have a constant reminder of your path, in editable fashion, presented in text mode. With this unset, the path is presented in graphical mode.

In either mode you can (with the right panel having focus) type the leading characters of your target and it will be located; a text entry box opens in the lower right corner of the nautilus window which can be cancelled by ESC.

>>Tabs would provide additional choice

I'm not sure what you would have tabs do exactly. It would surely complicate the tree view. And D&D. You can use the context, file or keyboard operations to open in a new window so you can click on a target and open it separately from the original nautilus window. This allows you to compare and operate on separate directories side-by-side, which a single window with tabs would not.

But, as they say, YMMV..

Re:Please let TFA say

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

It's not the same and I do run Nautilus. Not a real address bar.

Re:Please let TFA say

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

I prefer Gnome myself but the lack of functionality pushes me to KDe or more specifically Konqueror every time. Split level panes, tabs, everything's configurable, ACPI has more features (plus GNOME ACPI doesn't work like KDE's does on my Lenovo laptop).

    I don't think I was twisting the truth-Gnome is beautiful and I think the default layout is better than KDE's however KDE has the power under the hood that I need. As far Gnome's dependancies, you do know about Slackware dropping Gnome right? Whenever I have a desktop crash, it's Gnome. I'm running Ubuntu Breezy and the latest Dapper but I've been running Linux on the dekstop/server for 6 years.

    I think it's the desktop of choice as default on many distros because of the simplicity. That's fine but we haven't seen it work yet as a major deployment. I think all KDE needs to do is clean up the System Settings panel and maybe then the distros won't think that users will be terrified by choice.

Re:Please let TFA say

[kyrre]

Interesting. What does a real address bar accomplish that the not so real address bar of Nautilus can not do?

People actually use Nautilus?

[Penguin Programmer]

I've been using Linux for a long time, but it was relatively early in my Linux experience that I realized graphical file managers are useless and only serve to slow me down and make me less productive. For years, most *nixes have shipped with an excellent file manager: bash.

I find that after using the commandline for all of my file management for a number of years, it's actually infuriating to try and use a graphical file manager. Nothing works properly, I can't do the things I expect to be able to do easily and it requires extensive use of the mouse.

Call me a purist and a luddite, but I bet I can find and manage my files faster with bash and related utilities than you can with Nautilus.

Re:People actually use Nautilus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you are mostly correct. But lets take the case of a directory with photos/movie clips and you want to see what they are. Using scripting in Nautilus will make life much smooth, + you need think of people like my mother that use..I mean, try and use computers.

Re:People actually use Nautilus?

[h_benderson]

Scenario: You return from a three week trip, and offload all the pictures from your digicam to your harddrive, with the intention of sorting them and then backing them up. You notice that you haven't offloaded the pictures for quite some time now; thanks to your huge SD Card, the oldest pictures on your cam where taken around X-Mas. The digicam has them stored all in the same directory, which you transfer to your harddrive.

Now convince me that bash is simpler to sort through your pictures than Nautilus/Konqueror/Rox.

Re:People actually use Nautilus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok. If you want something specifically for managing photos then wouldn't it make sense to use something designed for that task. Of course a simple CLI isn't going to help when you need to view images as you manage them, so use something like GQview[1] or (my personal favourite) feh[2].

The right tool for the job.

[1] http://gqview.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://linuxbrit.co.uk/feh/wiki

Re:People actually use Nautilus?

[mangu]

The right tool for the job.

When you are trying to bring order to a directory, the right tool is a file management software, not an image management SW. With either Nautilus or Konqueror I can see instantly "hey, what is that text file doing among my pictures? Let me click on it and see what it contains". Or try to move /home/userid/sources/download/debian/libparportled _0.5.1.orig.tar.bz2 to /opt/sources/drivers/hardware/ports/parallel quicker in a CLI than in either Nautilus or Konqueror.

As you said, "The right tool for the job", and for managing files the right tool is a modern GUI file manager. It's only if the operation is too complex for the file manager that I consider using a text-based tool these days, and that's usually a Perl script, not bash or any of the Unix shells.

Re:People actually use Nautilus?

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Uh, the various linux dists are pretty much the only *nix likes to ship bash by default

Re:People actually use Nautilus?

[h4rr4r]

Ok lets try it.

CLI : mv /h(tab)/u(tab)...
GUI: go to the computer picture, click on it, move to /home/ then throught the rest of the tree, then do it all over again and then drag the file.

hmm, yeah right a gui is faster. /please share whatever you are smoking

Re:People actually use Nautilus?

[einhverfr]

For heavyweight use, of course you are correct. But what about lighter use? There are scenarios where having a spacial or browser view can be desirable. These occur when the main flow of information is from the computer to the user (sorting photos is one example mentioned as thumbnails make this far faster). Nautilus provides a great and rich information interface for tasks where the primary flow of information is from the computer to the user.

In essence the issue is direction of information flow. If you are providing complex commands to the computer, of course bash will be faster. For instances where the opposite is true, I would suggest that Nautilus would be a decent tool.

Re:People actually use Nautilus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, yes, I take your point but am not convinced. Maybe it's just because I am extremely anal when it comes to organising my files but I can't remember that last time a file ended up in the wrong place using the CLI (without me noticing my mistake). At the end of the day it's down to personal preference I suppose and I don't come across many situations where using a point-and-click file manager would be more efficient.

As a contrast to how I use my computer, my brother uses Windows XP and I cringe everytime I see his desktop because it is literally overflowing with icons for files, folders and applications. No method of file management (especially gui) is efficient if people don't have some sort of system.

Re:People actually use Nautilus?

[Dr. Evil]

I think it's riddilin.

CLI should be something like

for i in *
do type=`file $i`
case $type in
*text*) ;; # do nothing
*) echo $i $type ;; # insert your move operation here
esac
done

Re:People actually use Nautilus?

[mangu]

I tried this: mv sources/download/debian(tab)

I got: Display all 247 possibilities? (y or n)

For *small* directories, when you remember exactly the name of the file, then, well, yes, a CLI can be quite fast, if you use the tab key. But what if you thought the file name was parportled, instead of libparportled? "find sources/donwload/debian -name '*parport*'" anyone? How is that quicker than taking a look at the whole directory at once?

The new nautilus

[jonesy16]

For those still complaining that Nautilus is slow, you're probably the same people that hate Gnome and switched permanently to KDE about 5 years ago. Nautilus, especially in its latest incarnations is extremely fast at file browsing. And I don't know why more people don't mention it, but you can bypass the trash / recycle bin in almost every operating system by pressing "Shift-Delete" when you have a file selected. Works in windows, works in Gnome . . .

Re:The new nautilus

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Nautilus, especially in its latest incarnations is extremely fast at file browsing.

Lies. All Lies.

I've used Nautilus for about two years now. I can safely say it is slow. Not as slow as explorer, but slow. If takes its sweet time loading up previews of media files, or even listing a large directory. I can't count the number of times it has taken about 30 seconds to relist my home directory for no apparent reason.

All the while you're left with a lurching and wheeling file list as newly done previews, files or directories are thrown into the list, juddering your view and selections. Basically you just have to wait until Nautilus is finished, and sometimes, that takes quite a while.

Re:The new nautilus

[jonesy16]

La la la la la la la la

I won't call you a liar ;-) I just haven't had that experience since gnome 2.8 or earlier. Gnome 2.14 seems extremely fast to me and others, especially when it comes to Gnome Terminal (even though it still can't match the speed of Konsole). Maybe try wiping your .gnome directory and starting over with the latest version to see if there's just some archaic metafiles slowing you down or something. Otherwise, happy file navigating in your non-nautilus bliss :-)

Many of the same feelings here.

[Anonymous Coward]

I must agree. I was a former GNOME user, as well. But like you, I have since switched to KDE.

It wasn't just the problems with Nautilus that you mentioned. I think it was far more widespread, throughout the GNOME community and implementation. The decentralized community spirit doesn't lead to a highly-coherent, tightly-integrated desktop suite. KDE, on the other hand, does offer just such a collection of programs.

While I can go from one KDE program to another with ease, due to the commonality shared between many of the core programs, I find that that just isn't the case with GNOME. There are too many subtle differences between the packages. And then you get a package like Nautilus, while fantastic in its own right, it just doesn't fit in well with the other pieces of software.

I also must complain about the speed of Nautilus. To have a well-rounded experience, I recently did try Nautilus 2.12.0. Frankly, it's quite slow. At times it can become very frustrating waiting for it to redraw a directory containing several hundred files. It'd be one thing if both Konqueror, Nautilus, and other files managers ran into the same problem. But that just doesn't happen. Konqueror handles the same directory with ease.

Now, I haven't profiled it, or examined the Nautilus source code to find out why it was so much slower. It may very well have been a problem with GTK+ (but it's lack of quality is another discussion). Either way, I likely won't use a product that exhibits such flaws, or is built upon other flawed software.

I use gnome, but I hate nautilus

[njcajun]

Nautilus is one of the most annoying interfaces ever. I generally like a lot of the other gnome apps I use, and find gnome in general to be pretty usable, but I don't rely (knowingly) on nautilus for anything, and I don't go to it as a tool to do anything.

My apologies if this is incorrect, but I believe nautilus is responsible for the disgustingly *bad* interface that pops up when you run firefox under gnome and want to choose an application to open something with. I can't just type in a command and hit enter... that would be too easy. Instead, you have to wait for nautilus to load the entire freakin' /usr/bin directory and then click on the thing you want and click "open" or something. C'mon. That's horrid.

I guess it doesn't fit my brain (what little matter there is of it). But OTOH, doesn't an article showing you the hidden features of nautilus kind of speak to its usability? By the way, aren't these features documented in the Nautilus manual?

Re:I use gnome, but I hate nautilus

[illerd]

That "usability enhancement" is absolutely terrible, I agree. But I think it's GTK's fault. Well, not really, because with other GTK apps (gimp) you can right click and get an "open location" or "open path" option, or something like that, and it gives you a simple text box in which you can type filesystem paths, and even do tab-completion. Of course, the Firefox wizards haven't yet seen the reason to enable this feature. So I guess you have them to blame.

Re:I use gnome, but I hate nautilus

[pyros]

With the current file chooser in GNOME you can just start typing to specify a file in the currently viewed folder. Or you cna hit ctrl+l and type in an absolute path to any file.

Re:I use gnome, but I hate nautilus

[fader]

My apologies if this is incorrect, but I believe nautilus is responsible for the disgustingly *bad* interface that pops up when you run firefox under gnome and want to choose an application to open something with. I can't just type in a command and hit enter... that would be too easy.

Yup, you're incorrect. That's the GTK2 file dialog, not Nautilus. They look similar because they're both GNOMEish, but the file dialog isn't actually a part of Nautilus. Oh, and you *can* type in a path... did you try to just start typing? As soon as you hit that first /, a textbox will appear. It even automagically completes as you type. It's extremely slick and fast if you already know the path you want.

Re:I use gnome, but I hate nautilus

[plague3106]

Oh, and you *can* type in a path... did you try to just start typing? As soon as you hit that first /, a textbox will appear. It even automagically completes as you type. It's extremely slick and fast if you already know the path you want.

Having a control hidden like that seems to be pretty bad UI, if you ask me.

Re:I use gnome, but I hate nautilus

[nuzak]

And in KDE, you can switch to thumbnail views to get "that picture of the cat named NIKON_somenumber.jpg that doesn't have that glare in it", or to details view to get "whichever of the training docs with almost the same name I updated yesterday".

I don't care so much that gnome hides some basic features behind a hotkey, but a lot just don't seem to be there at all.

And both still lack support for virtual folders or any kind of "narrowing search" feature. People spend a lot of time in file pickers. Make 'em powerful or get rid of them entirely. Implementing something like the draggable "this document" widget that existed all the way back in globalview would be a good start toward that.

Re:I use gnome, but I hate nautilus

[xyphor]

It even automagically completes as you type. It's extremely slick and fast if you already know the path you want.

Not really. It does autocomplete, but if I directly type "/usr/bin/xmms" and hit enter, I have to wait for the entire /usr/bin directory to load. It's really annoying. I haven't tried the ctrl-l method, hopefully it bypasses the mandatory entire directory listing.

/x

Re:I use gnome, but I hate nautilus

[yuna49]

Wow, how non-obvious is that. Of course I would expect a *graphical* file manager to open an address box when you type "/". What's so bad about having an address box at the top of the screen? Even Windows Explorer lets me type in a filepath or UNC name. Konqueror works fine for me, thank you.

The Mozilla problem has been sitting in the bugzilla queue for quite some time now, too https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30881 5. I don't understand why everyone suddenly wants to make the keyboard obsolete.

Re:I use gnome, but I hate nautilus

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Oh, and you *can* type in a path... did you try to just start typing? As soon as you hit that first /, a textbox will appear.

Genius. Sheer genius. Provide a textbox address bar functionality, but make it invisible until the user decides to type an address. Because, you know, users will be able to psychically sense its presence and decide to start typing, rather than just assuming it hasn't been implemented.

Whoever is in charge of UI at Gnome is obviously a double agent engaged in sabotage. Either that or too busy taking HIG surveys to bother actually coming up with a usable interface.

Re:I use gnome, but I hate nautilus

[ambrosius27]

That problem is being rectified in the newest GTK+. See screenshots of the visible button which will pop up the location bar:

http://home.arcor.de/famscheffler/gfc/gfc.png

http://home.arcor.de/famscheffler/gfc/gfc-loc.png

Re:I use gnome, but I hate nautilus

[baadger]

noooooooooo keep it hidden :|

Nautilus Actions

[tjwhaynes]

The most useful feature of Nautilus is the scripts functionality, so simple & elegant.

I used to think so but then I discovered Nautilus Actions and things have been a lot better since then. But don't throw away your Nautilus scripts - you can use them with Actions. The beauty of Actions is that it is sensitive to the current selected file/files/directory/directories/mix so that only Actions that are appropriate are visible.

For example, if you have a script to make a thumbnail of one or more JPEGs, then you can set the criteria for Actions to only show you that action for selections of just JPEGs.

Give it a try - it's a really nice feature. Hopefully it will be part of GNOME 2.16.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:Nautilus Actions

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Oh - that does look cool

I hope it makes it into 2.16 too :-) Cheers for the link!

Hiding the desktop

[xav12]

The most useful tip I know for Nautilus is how to stop it drawing the desktop:

Launch GConf (gconf-editor on the Dapper command line), navigate to /apps/nautilus/preferences and uncheck the "show_desktop" option.

This is especially useful if you connect to a Linux box using XDMCP from a machine using a rootless X server. I use Cygwin/X in rootless mode, and this switch means that bringing a Linux application to the top doesn't cause the root window (i.e. the Linux desktop) to be drawn, obscuring the Windows applications behind.

Thank you!

[Anonymous Coward]

I never knew you could make remote directories over SSH show up as folders in Konqueror. That's incredibly useful. Thanks!

Re:Thank you!

[baadger]

I just discovered the same feature in Nautilus today. I've been tunneling Samba over SSH and running mount like a dolt for ages.

Re:nautilus-actions [same exists for KDE]

[FellowConspirator]

"Actions" in Nautilus with that extension is equivalent to KDE's "Actions" -- something that I use a lot and think is sorely under-used (in both KDE and GNOME).

For example, adding a context-menu option to rotate images involves nothing more than writing a .desktop entry that identifies the file-types it applies to and doing 'mogrify -rotate 90 %f' to them. That's a simple case, but I use this sort of thing all the time (for example, to publish RPMs to a local repository, to add/remove items from a mirror list, convert data formats, etc.).

Desktop Community Support?

[Doc Ruby]

Since upgrading Ubuntu 5.04 to 5.10, my desktop has had serious defects in rendering fonts in some apps (Firefox and Evolution), and can't burn audio CDs without refusing, misburning or crashing desktop/OS. The past 7 months of automatic updates, including the latest X.org dump, haven't fixed the problems. I haven't found messages in the Ubuntu forums, GNOME website or elsewhere on the Web indicating others with my problem, or who have solved it. Posting in those Ubuntu and GNOME forums hasn't returned any results. Where do I turn for that kind of support that actually works?

Re:Desktop Community Support?

[HaydnH]

howabout here... or here... or even here!

Re:Desktop Community Support?

[olafura]

https://launchpad.net/malone is a good place to start, you can file bugs there Also you can register to ubunt-user list: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-u sers But it's better to have a gmail account for that, if you need one I can give you one if you mail me at olafra at gmail.com

Re:Desktop Community Support?

[Risen888]

I've got to say, I'm stymied. I've been using 5.10 since release day, I burn 5+ CDs a week (now I use Gnomebaker, but for a long time I used the standard CD/DVD burn dialogue), and I've never gotten a coaster. This may sound stupid, but are you absolutely sure your drive didn't take a crap on you? Can you burn data CDs? Can you burn from the command line? If you dual-boot, can you burn with Windows?

Re:Desktop Community Support?

[michaelwigle]

I have to admit I didn't have any of those problems when I was running Ubuntu 5.X but one possibility may be for you to consider upgading to 6.X (Dapper Drake). Although it's admittedly still in beta I use it as my primary desktop at work and have found it to be more than stable enough and seems to render everything properly. Anyway, just a thought if all else fails.

Michael

Re:Desktop Community Support?

[Doc Ruby]

I can burn data CDs. The Nautilus app that launches when a CD is inserted, gnomebaker, serpentine and SoundJuicer all fail, usually just hanging after writing a little bit to the blank CD (ruining it). I don't dual-boot. But I have had some failures to burn data CDs at full speed (4x), apparently succeeding but then unreadable, which succeeded at 2x.

Re:Desktop Community Support?

[Risen888]

It sounds hardware-related. See if you can borrow an external burner from somebody and try that.

.trash

[joe 155]

the .trash is just the trash folder which is on the desktop, from what I read in the article i thought it was doing the windows thing of not deleting even after you remove it from the trash can, which is not the case... I don't know why they even bothered to mention it... I suppose it gave me something to do looking for it and then testing my sending something there. One interesting thing I did notice is that when I had what is ostensibly 2 versions of the same folder and deleted a file from one it went from the other in real time. This is certainly an improvement on explorer where you have to refresh everytime you want to see changes...

Confessions from a command hard liner

[SpaghettiPattern]

I remember. People telling people to RTFM. And most people not RTFM.

I tried Nautilus years ago when it bombed constantly. So I never actually used it.

Now I'm pointed at the two options that make it work (view as list and open in browser) I might actually use it. And when my wife calls with a problem I can refer to it.

Thanks again to woz and jobs for coming up with the finder concept.

number 10

[Anonymous Coward]

10) it sucks
11) it crashes
12) it's a memory hog
13) use rm, cp, ln
14) it puts crap on your desktop
15) it has cheesy icons
16) it crashes
17) it looks silly
18 the only people who use are developers and noobs

Re:number 10

[baadger]

10) it doesn't
11) it hasn't
12) so is every other file manager of equal functionality
13) we do
14) thats one of the things it can do yes
15) so change them you lazy scrote
17) so does your post
18) opposite ends of the spectrum?

The best file manager is Midnight Commander

[sgholt]

Midnight Commander is in my opinion the best of all file managers. Nautilus' "spatial" browser setting just sucks...unfortunately I have not seen much improvement in Gnome at all in the last few upgrades. I can't say same the same for KDE which IS getting better as is Konqueror. The file manager was perfected with Norton Commander and all of it's clones.

Well, SBM never seems to fail

[Harold of the Rocks]

I once worked at an unnamed institution which had a large Windoze network and some smaller "research" Linux labs. Just like everyone else's story for the most part the IT guys didn't have a clue about the Linux side of things. For some reason, which I could never figure out, trying to connect to people's Windoze home directories through SAMBA (smbmount) would never work properly--we'd always get some weird auth error or something. Just for kicks I tried to smb://hostname/share one day with Nautilus and it worked without complalint. Don't ask, don't tell I guess, but it sure saved some hassle transfering large files from host to host.

Anyone actually use emblems or notes?

[reed]

Does anyone actually use these?

Four things would make them actually useful:

1. The fact that it only displays one emblem in list view mode is unfortunate -- if in list view there was a column for each emblem (or a "subcolumn" for an "emblems" main column), which you could use as a sort criteria, then you could very easily find files with certain emblems.

2. Automatic and dynamic emblems based on combinations of things like current age, original directory of creation, current directory, file type, size, patterns in the filename or grepped from the contents, etc.

3. Ability to create new emblems on the fly, even without an icon (just text), right from a particular files "properties" window or the sidebar. Really they are the same idea as "tags" and you should be able to invent new ones as needed without going through the "miscellaneous file properties" catchall bin that is "Backgrounds and Emblems" in the edit menu.

4. Using emblems when doing a full filesystem search; a seperate catalogue for emblemized items could be kept to make it very fast. If the actual filesystem supports "tags" or "keywords" as metadata for files, then add emblem tags to the files, so non-nautilus aware tools could use these.

Re:Anyone actually use emblems or notes?

[und0]

I don't have the link at hands, but i've read something like that (the tags thing) done by at least one Gnome developer. Ok, i think i found the link: http://www.chipx86.com/blog/?p=140 And yes, my sister uses the emblems, but only to differentiate directories, but she probably will use them more if she could make searches or filter files with them... (=

Re:Anyone actually use emblems or notes?

[Budenny]

Yes I use emblems. To warn a user to be extra careful when using something. Like, I have to have gprename on one machine for some users, and I have a swiss army knife as the icon. But I want to warn occasional users to be very careful, so I put an exclamation point emblem in it.

You probably have other ideas about how you would do it, but in the social context of the organisation I did it for, it works, its accepted, and lots of other neater solutions would not be. Its accepted, the simple rule is, if an app has an exclamation point on its icon, only use it if you know what you are doing. People respect it.

Re:Anyone actually use emblems or notes?

[rhendershot]

I use emblems to decorate desk-cuts that I need to revisit. It helps me visually locate them in a way that grouping or positioning on the desktop can't.

Why exclude MS and Apple?

[Comboman]

4) There's rumours of spyware (and frankly the fourth one applies to virtual[ly] all closed source software that doesn't come from MS or Apple).

Why exclude MS and Apple? In fact, I'd be more suspicious of software from MS or Apple spying on me since they have intimate access to undocumented holes in the respective operating systems. All other apps trying to "phone home" should be caught by your firewall.

number ten

[Cyno]

Nautilus had all these features back in '98. They just had to bury them for a while to make it fair for everyone else..

Honestly, why have emblems and then take them away and bring them back? Are emblems confusing for the disabled or something? I'm sure there are reasons to take them away again. And what about web browsing? Everyone knows filemanagers like Explorer are really just web browsers.

GNOME is stupid. It feels like many people are trying to develope this DE by committee. I like the way KDE just quietly makes lots of progress instead of pretending its something its not. I like the way I can right-click and configure it without resorting to gconf-editor or whatever its called now. I have yet to need to edit any sort of KDE database to configure my desktop or apps. Its amazing. Its like it doesn't have a GNOME registry or something. Tell me, was GNOME just trying to be like Windows again? Because this whole registry idea feel very much like Windows. GNOME should be the default desktop for all mainstream linux distros, it suits 'em.

Re:number ten

[WWWWolf]

Honestly, why have emblems and then take them away and bring them back?

To my knowledge, they were never removed. I've always seen the emblems in Nautilus...

And what about web browsing? Everyone knows filemanagers like Explorer are really just web browsers.

I'm not quite following your rhetorical points. Is GNOME's copying of Windows a good thing or a bad thing? Is KDE's copying of Windows good thing or a bad thing? You seem to think KDE is good, then recommend GNOME for most dists because it "suits them". Logic hoy...

Anyway, "Everyone knows filemanagers like Explorer are really just web browsers" just hints You Must Be New Here. I might say that in Slashdot, everyone knows that integrating MSIE to Windows was the most colossal mistake Microsoft has made in recent history, from legal, security, and UI design points of view.

GNOME folks tried integrating web browser to Nautilus too, back in Nautilus 1.x. They realised it wasn't the way to go. Luckily.

I have yet to need to edit any sort of KDE database to configure my desktop or apps.

And I haven't had to use gconf-editor for pretty much anything at all since 2.6 or so, can't be too sure but it's sure been heck of a long time...

And on the other hand, I have given up trying to figure out how the heck to not make KDE to use Konqueror (which I don't have installed) to open web links. Any help on how to get rid of the dreaded "could not find service 'kfmclient'" would be appreciated. And don't say "install Konqueror". GNOME can open links in Firefox just fine without either Nautilus or Epiphany installed! Maybe I'll need to write a 5-minute shell hack to replace kfmclient... oh, wait, writing shell scripts to bypass idiocies of the desktop environment is so GNOME user stuff, isn't it?

Re:number ten

[gnud]

You seem to think KDE is good, then recommend GNOME for most dists because it "suits them". Logic hoy...
No, he recommended GNOME to most _mainstream_ dists, probably because he doesn't think too highly of them, if you take the rest of his post into consideration.

I have to agree with you about the browser-in-filemanager thing. I really don't get what GP was trying to say.

And I haven't had to use gconf-editor for pretty much anything at all since 2.6 or so, can't be too sure but it's sure been heck of a long time...

I don't run gnome, but I use some gnome apps. I have to use gconf-editor way too much.

And on the other hand, I have given up trying to figure out how the heck to not make KDE to use Konqueror (which I don't have installed) to open web links.

1. Run kcontrol.
2. find the element called "KDE Components". Expand.
3. Choose "component choser" from its children.
4. Choose "Web browser" from the list of components. (ouch. KDE control center is a mess :)
5. Select the "in the following browser..." radio-button. Type the command into the text field, or use the appkication chooser (the button with "..." writen on it, to the right of the text field.
Hope this helps :)

Re:number ten

[WWWWolf]

I don't run gnome, but I use some gnome apps. I have to use gconf-editor way too much.

Then do yourself a favor and install the gnome-control-center. I have the same situation with KDE, and even I was clueful enough to install kcontrol, even when I don't use the majority of KDE apps.

4. Choose "Web browser" from the list of components. (ouch. KDE control center is a mess :)

Yeah, says /usr/bin/gnome-moz-remote in the text field. Trust me, I found this thing it really easily.

Next I say, for example, Help - About KDE... and then click on the kde.org web link. "Could not find service 'kfmclient'."

Okay, maybe it just got mad because I wanted it to use the default GNOME browser, me heretic me. I change it to say /usr/bin/firefox like all people who prefer to configure each damn thing differently, and hit Apply.

Help - About KDE... click on the link: "Could not find service 'kfmclient'."

And I did research a bit: kfmclient is in, you guessed it, konqueror package, which I don't want to install because I don't need several web browsers and file managers, let alone ones I don't use. gnome-moz-remote, which is the proggie GNOME apps use to open web links, is in gnome-bin, the generic package that has a lot of other generically useful binaries.

Re:number ten

[Cyno]

Okay, so you're a moron who complains about your incomplete installation, got it.

How do you make the autohide feature on the GNOME panel show only 1 pixel width?

How do you tell Nautilus which applications it should use for certain filetypes? Looks like they might have finally fixed this in 2.14. AFT!!!

What happened to the right-click terminal option in GNOME 2.14 in FC5? I noticed KDE brought it back.. hrmmm..

Maybe they don't think we notice these changes..

Whatever their reasons it directly impacts my experience..

So bad PR for GNOME, they need to get back with the program. It should be written by programmers for programmers, not by parents for children. If I wanted hand holding I'd buy a Mac.

Re:number ten

[WWWWolf]

Okay, so you're a moron who complains about your incomplete installation, got it.

I'm a moron who doesn't want to install a program I'm not going to use anyway. Maybe I'm just a moron for not wanting to buy a bigger hard drive and waste bandwidth for all those starving third world countries to use.

And I'm a complete fucking utter moron for suggesting that maybe we could ask Debian to put kfmclient in "kde-core" instead of "konqueror", just like they put gnome-moz-remote in "gnome-bin" instead of "epiphany-browser". At least until upstream screws it up again. But of course, we can't expect KDE to concentrate functionality that should be in core somewhere to illogical places like the core! Things like accessing the Web Browser have to be integrated to the Web Browser!

I'm cured! Let's waste disk space in harmony, joy, and capitalistic orgastic joy of mass hysteria or something! And finally, we can expect Microsoft to join the Linux desktop projects! They know all about wasting disk space, maybe they can offer us some expert advice!

How do you make the autohide feature on the GNOME panel show only 1 pixel width?

No idea. I prefer my Window Maker icons 64 pixels.

How do you tell Nautilus which applications it should use for certain filetypes? Looks like they might have finally fixed this in 2.14. AFT!!!

Puzzled me for a while, but someone told me the answer: they're using the Freedesktop.org shared-mime-info standard for MIME associations. Just use all the usual tools for that stuff.

What happened to the right-click terminal option in GNOME 2.14 in FC5? I noticed KDE brought it back.. hrmmm..

"Right click terminal option"? Eh? I don't quite follow.

Re:number ten

[gnud]

Then perhaps you should compile kmfclient yourself, or find a distro that seperates it from the Konqueror package.

Re:number ten

[Cyno]

"Right click terminal option"?

When you right-click on the desktop, which is managed by nautilus and konqueror in GNOME and KDE respectively, a popup menu has several options to create a new icon, configure the desktop, etc. They usually also have an option here to launch a terminal, but that only seems to be available from time to time.

But I dunno, I just like ranting on and on about these little quirks. Every distro I've used has its faults, but at least they're not as bad as Windows. I have the option to replace the kernel or X11 or whatever suits my needs. But what I need is my own system, configured just the way I like it upon installation. Nothing else seems to work for me, because they're incomplete, full of bugs, lacking features and don't upgrade/update properly.

If you want it done right..

Re:number ten

[WWWWolf]

They usually also have an option here to launch a terminal, but that only seems to be available from time to time.

Okay - I don't use Nautilus to draw the desktop, so I didn't remember. I find it much faster to simply hit shift+ctrl+n or shift+ctrl+t in an existing terminal...

...and in Window Maker, you use right-click-on-desktop to Launch Everything In The Whole World anyway, so I definitely get every X shell that way in any case. =)

But I dunno, I just like ranting on and on about these little quirks.

As do I. But at least I realise that ranting about little quirks in the Competiting System(tm) has absolutely no effect and will only annoy people. As soon as I get back from a trip I'll file an enhancement suggestion regarding kfmclient packaging. That's how things get fixed, not by flaming the thing down, you know.

Even if I use GNOME and a little bit of KDE apps doesn't mean that I simply polarize the thing; I'd rather use the proper apps for the job. Qt folks don't have anything quite as good as Firefox or GIMP. GTK+ folks don't have anything that's quite as good as Scribus. KDE doesn't have anything quite comparable to Nautilus. GNOME doesn't have anything quite as good as amaroK or Psi. KDE folks can't come up with a good multimedia architecture so they also support GStreamer in amaroK - best of the both worlds! I want both work, and as far as I can see, they both do their things wonderfully. All apps have their stupid sides.

In other news...

[msuarezalvarez]

In other news, the GNOME project has decided to change its logo.

Nine things....

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only think of one thing you should know....IT SUCKS!

changing application - file binding

[Dionysus]

One thing I never got used to (don't know if it is a Nautilus thing or a GNOME thing) is how hard it is to make a new association between a file and an application. Apparently, you have to go to gconf, and create a new association, by extension and type. And I could never get it to stick (as in, log out, go back in, and the association disappeared). And god forbid, if you want to associate xml and xhtml to different applications. In KDE, right-click on the file, open with... option, type in the application, check the "remember application association...". Done and done.

Re:changing application - file binding

[SpeedMan]

Huh? Right click on the file, select properties, select the "Open With" tab, add, or remove preferred applications for the file type and select the default radio button.

Re:changing application - file binding

[Nosklo]

is how hard it is to make a new association between a file and an application

What is hard in that?

1. Right click
2. Properties
3. "Open With" Tab
4. Choose whatever application you want or add yours to the list
5. ????
6. Profit!

CVS?

[duffbeer23]

Has anyone gotten CVS or any other versioning system working with nautilus? Under Linux I use lincvs which color codes each file by it's CVS status. In Windoze their are tools like Tortoise CVS that tweak the file explorer to do much the same thing and have corresponding context menus. Any luck w/ Nautilus in this vein?

One thing I know about Nautilus.

[TractorBarry]

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.

Re:One thing I know about Nautilus.

[Rytis]

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. Well, it's not missing under Gnome 2.14 as it works for me.

Re:One thing I know about Nautilus.

[mangu]

I run Ubuntu and for some reason Konqueror doesn't look quite right

I recently installed Kubuntu and found it necessary to install the kdeartwork-theme-icon package and switch my icons to the "kde classic" theme. Much better looking, IMHO, than the default that Kubuntu uses.

Re:One thing I know about Nautilus.

[tjwhaynes]

1 The whole Spatial browsing idea. Yes you can turn it off

So turn it off!

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.

Umm - it works for me with GNOME 2.14. Pretty much everywhere too. If the backdrop has the focus, then I can choose items on the backdrop. If a filer window has the focus - yep - works there too. If I want to switch from window to window - Alt-Tab. If I want to switch from window to desktop, Ctl-Alt-Tab. If I'm in a loading dialogue, yes. If I'm in a save dialogue - it still works there too. Completion works too in those load/save scenarios - just hit Tab. I rarely take my hands off the keyboard - it's an essential feature for me.

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.

Right click applies to the object you click on. So if you select a group of files and right-click on something else, you get the Context menu for that object. If however you select a group of files and right-click on *any* member of that group, you get the Context menu for that group. It's not that hard.

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.

I thought you wanted to use the keyboard? Try select the group of files, Ctl-C, open the directory you want to paste things into, Ctl-V. Easy. Or you could have selected the group of files, right-click and choose cut or copy. Open the new location and right-click->Paste.

I used to be a hardened command line user. These days, using GNOME, I find myself using the Nautilus interface more and more. Along with Nautilus Actions, it allows me to get what I need done, quickly and easily.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:One thing I know about Nautilus.

[FooBarWidget]

1. Obviously there are people who like it and don't like it. I've been using spatial mode for 9 months now, and I can definitely say this:
* It doesn't suck like the Windows 95 one.
* It works pretty well. In fact, when I'm in Windows I'm having trouble navigating around because I can't easily open a new Explorer window like I can in Nautilus.

2. Huh? Type-ahead-find has been implemented in Nautilus for as long as I can remember. I use Nautilus 2.10 and type-ahead-find works just fine.

3. What version of Nautilus do you use? I use 2.10 and when I rightclick on a bunch of selected items, the selection doesn't disappear AND the Copy item is enabled. This has been the case since Nautilus 2.0.

4. What are you talking about? It works fine here.

Re:One thing I know about Nautilus.

[Halvy]

Why don't you put your efforts into helping Gnome/Nautilus instead of reinventing the wheel?

As far as the issues you mentioned:

#1 is not, because you admit it can be fixed once and for all by setting a switch.

#2 Apparently another poster just mentioned that 2.14 has finally fixed this issue.

However it is funny that you want something that helps reduce Gnome to 'One Button', when you imply this is what is making Gnome a useless manager!

Remember Gnome is older, more stable and STILL more Mac like (consider it's roots), and also more apt for the developers/hackers world... soooo hence the developers are not as quick to add features like this, when they use the shell which is usually infinitely 'faster' for their work/needs.

#3 & #4 Seem to be the same issue, which I don't have a problem doing this.. it may have been an isolated incident that you have run into. Try it again, I bet it works for you actually.

There is a reason Gnome is still going strong, and big time distros like Ubuntu are taking it under its wings.

It is because it is more secure and configurable, with more seasoned users and developers than any other manager, including Doze.

Just remember that Linux (Unix) is still considered quite new on the desktop, but it is quickly 'catching up', and we will soon have the best of all worlds. :)

-- My favorite thing about OSS-- is its Militancy!!

Re:One thing I know about Nautilus.

[mz2]

1 The whole Spatial browsing idea: ------- Not the default in any longer in any distro using 2.14, 2 Poor keyboard support: -------- Simply incorrect. Writing a filename works perfecly not only in nautilus but in open/save dialogs, and indeed in many (in fact almost all) GTK treeviews/lists. Also, have you ever tried Ctrl+L, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+F in Nautilus? Makes life very easy for us keyboard-oriented. 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: ------- Incorrect. Works like a charm. 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. ------- Again, incorrect. You can either do Paste into Folder by right-clicking a folder, or you can do Ctrl+1 and just click on some free space in the icon view.

Re:One thing I know about Nautilus.

[mz2]

Sorry, forgot the HTML formatting...

1 The whole Spatial browsing idea:
-------
Not the default in any longer in any distro using 2.14.

2 Poor keyboard support:
--------
Simply incorrect. Writing a filename works perfecly not only in nautilus but in open/save dialogs, and indeed in many (in fact almost all) GTK treeviews/lists. Also, have you ever tried Ctrl+L, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+F in Nautilus? Makes life very easy for us keyboard-oriented.

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:
-------
Incorrect. Works like a charm.

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.
-------
Again, incorrect. You can either do Paste into Folder by right-clicking a folder, or you can do Ctrl+1 and just click on some free space in the icon view.

Re:One thing I know about Nautilus.

[Nosklo]

I guess you must be using some strange ancient version or something. I have tried some of the stuff you said and the results where not quite like what you described:

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.

So what? You can turn it off, period. Some people like it.

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"

I type some letter and it goes to the file with that letter. If I know the name of the file, I keep typing more from the file name until that single file gets selected by elimination. It works wonders to find files. If I want to find a file named "nautilus" on a directory full of files starting with n, I can type "nau" and the file is selected. I don't keep typing n n n n n all over. It is just plain stupid.

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.

You must right-click on the selection itself. Right clicking on an unselected item obviously changes selection to that item before opening context menu, since the "context" in that case is the unselected file. Unless, of course, you right click holding "control", which adds unselected item to the selection before popping up the menu. Behavior seems correct to me.

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.

Similarly you must choose where you are "right-clicking". If you right click on a folder, the menu says "Paste Into Folder". If you right-click on an empty space on the folder you are currently on, the plain "paste" option shows up, but no "copy" or "cut" options. Of course, you can always select paste from the edit menu or use the universally known "CTRL-V" keystroke.

Just because it is not "just like windows" doesn't mean it is unusable. In fact, it is pretty good once you learn how to use it. Good luck writing your own file manager thought. Being in C#/Mono, I bet it will be blinding fast.[/sarcasm]

Re:One thing I know about Nautilus.

[Coryoth]

3. What version of Nautilus do you use? I use 2.10 and when I rightclick on a bunch of selected items, the selection doesn't disappear AND the Copy item is enabled. This has been the case since Nautilus 2.0.

4. What are you talking about? It works fine here.

I did some experimenting and it seems that his problem is that he's extremely inaccurate with his mouse. If you select a group of files and then right click on some other file not in the selected group then it cancels the selection, selects the file you right clicked on, and brings up the appropriate menu. Similarly, if you right click on the background of the window paste indeed does work fine. If, for some reason you manage to hold your mouse over an icon instead then yes naturally it selects that file and brings up the right click menu for it which doesn't have a paste option. In other words, if you wave your mouse wildly while right clicking then yes, you can experience the described behaviour.

Jedidiah.

Re:One thing I know about Nautilus.

[JCholewa]

> when I'm in Windows I'm having trouble navigating around because
> I can't easily open a new Explorer window like I can in Nautilus.

Win-E brings up a new File Explorer in MS Windows. Or "Explore" from the Start button's context ("right-click") menu. You can map other shortcut combinations to opening specific folders (though it's not as easy to set up as it is in other OSes). If you want to open up a new File Explorer window for a specific folder from an existing Explorer window, you right-click on the folder (only in the Folder view, though) and choose "Explore" or "Open". That's not too hard.

Mind, I prefer using Konq. ^_^

--
    -JC

Re:One thing I know about Nautilus.

[horza]

Personally I find Nautilus to be the single biggest impediment to me using Linux as my primary O/S.

Install ROX: intuitive, lightweight, and lightening fast. It works under any window manager.

Phillip.

Not that it hasn't already been said

[wjeff]

but my god, what a piece of crap. Gnome is bad enough, a swollen, parasite ridden pig, with dystemper. But Nautilus twice as bad, and is the epitome of everything that is wrong with gnome, take a simple task, to wit, visually representing a hierarchal file system in a easy to understand way, and simplifying the manipulation of that file system, and instead create a file manager that does everything else (that is rightly the purview of other utilities) but manage files well. If want a desktop/window manager, I will install a desktop/window manager. Worse like a lot of gnome applications, Nautilus requires a number of additional huge footprint modules to be running in the background that either start with Nautilus, but don't shut down when Nautilus is shutdown, or just start no matter what when X is started.

Anything further from an idea file manager I couldn't imagine, it is almost identical the role Windows Explorer plays in Windows, but manages to use even more resources (I never thought I would see the day when a UNIX program would out bloat a Windows program.

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Nine things:

1) Is ugly
2) Is GTK/GTK2
3) Depend of Gnome.
4) Is ... rare?
5) Is options limited.
6) Osama Been Laden use it to manage his batcave videos.
7) Bush ... Bush ... Bushhhhhhh ... Bush don't know what is Nautilus!! (true, almost dies eating a cake !! imaging with a filebrowser!!!).
8) Ass Ketchup (Pokemon) use Nautilus .. gaaaaahhh!! (OMG!, do you need anymore?!!)
9) OK! you wanted it! If you want options/usability .. Konqueror... if you want minimalistic ... Rox ... but if you're a Debian-Gnome-nerd of course, you must use Nautilus and run across the internet saying the wonderfulls of be a Debian-Gnome-nerd.

Re:LOL

[WilliamSChips]

Rox

is a disappointment. Take this from someone who tried it. It sucks in every way.

8) Ass Ketchup (Pokemon) use Nautilus .. gaaaaahhh!! (OMG!, do you need anymore?!!)

No, Pokemon is pure-KDE.

Everything's non-obvious in computing...

[raddan]

until you become a programmer, and then everything is strikingly non-obvious.

Version?

[bettlebrox]

The latest version of Nautilus is 2.14.0, which is included in Fedora Core 5.

I think that should read as:

The version of Nautilus included with Fedora Core 5 is 2.14.0.

Both Debian Unstable & Ubuntu Dapper come with Nautilus 2.14.1 (and I'm sure other distros do too:

Debian Unstable
Ubuntu Dapper

Mounting isos under linux (mount -o loop)

[Anonymous Coward]

It has nothing to do with distros or Nautilus, it is an option of the mount command (-o loop). For example:

mount -t iso9660 -o loop [filename.iso] [mount directory]

What is the big deal? What is the connection with Nautilus? Wou can write the above command in a shell script even if Nautilus is not installed.

Mod this down!

[Dr. Evil]

Meh. Karma can only portioned out by the cosmos.

Mac OS X: On My Command

[Clith]

On My Command is the Mac version of this sort of functionality. It lets you do pretty much anything with a shell script in a context-sensitive way. Highly recommended.

OS X Image Mounting

[Kadin2048]

Actually on OSX, the system just opens ".dmg" and ".iso" files with a little application called "DiskImageMounter.app" (I think that's its name, I am likewise not at a Mac right now) which calls hdiutil (presumably) and mounts it on the desktop. (Actually, in /Volumes/, but to the user it appears on the desktop.)

If you right-click on an image file, you can choose to open it either with the mounting program, or in Disk Copy, or in Adaptec's Toast if you have it installed.

A little RTFM and Nautilus is your friend

[suitepotato]

Since I tried ditching Windows for day to day workstation use over a year ago, I've been using Gnome and Nautilus as defaults on FC. FC3 and now FC5. After reading of just a few things I could do, and the answer to some questions on other things that weren't as cool but totally necessary to getting things done, I found Nautilus was more than useful.

KDE on the other hand was unstable no matter what until recently (at which point xcompmgr also became stable and so did transparency and shadow effects for some bizarro reason), Kicker kept dying on login, and Konqueror kept doing anything other than what I wanted or crashing. Documentation was much worse and the help files looked like they were written by people for whom two sentence memos count as tl/dr.

I go with Nautilus by default and couldn't be happier with it. People who prefer command prompts are welcome to use them. Nautilus isn't a command prompt system and if you're going to compare apples and oranges then at least compare mc, emacs, and so on with ALL gui managers. Just so you know my take, in an age where keyboard skills are lacking more and more, using text to give people a chance to fat finger rm and other things is just stupid. GUIs exist for many reasons, and that is one of them.

I can't believe someone else hasn't mentioned this

[dracphelan]

It's also great for sinking ships of war and whaling ships.

offtopic - installing linux on firewire drive

[wazzzup]

I'd like to give Linux a spin so I downloaded the Ubuntu (breezy) dvd install. Installed on my external firewire drive but 75% of the way through it told me it couldn't install the boot loader. Did some googling and it seems you have to jump through some hoops to get it to work right.

My question is this, are there currently any distros that can install and boot from an external firewire drive without having to monkey around with RAM disks, etc.? I don't have the space on my internal drive to sacrifice so my external is the only option.

Thanks.

Re:offtopic - installing linux on firewire drive

[Budenny]

This is not a sensible thing to do, what you are suggesting. Buy another hard drive, set it up as slave, and then install one of the following: PC Linux, PCBSD, DesktopBSD, or, what I would most recommend, Mandriva.

Re:offtopic - installing linux on firewire drive

[NullProg]

I'd like to give Linux a spin so I downloaded the Ubuntu (breezy) dvd install. Installed on my external firewire drive but 75% of the way through it told me it couldn't install the boot loader. Did some googling and it seems you have to jump through some hoops to get it to work right.

If all you want to do is give Linux a spin then download and try one of the Live CDs. http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

If you make a decision to install, then ask your firewire question here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/

Enjoy,

Re:offtopic - installing linux on firewire drive

[wazzzup]

Thank you for your help. I'll do just that.

Re:offtopic - installing linux on firewire drive

[NullProg]

Thank you for your help. I'll do just that.
No problem. Just don't judge Linux by all the Live CDS. Some have pretty bad hardware detection. Try the brand names first. OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandrake etc.

Enjoy,

Nautilus may not be for you all

[Budenny]

I don't greatly care for it either, and prefer the traditional two pane file manager. But, you install Gnome and Nautilus for a naive user, you can walk away and get no calls about it. Never a single one about how to find my files. Spatial browsing is fine too, and if they find it irritating, which they may after a while, you just have it open files in the same window.

I don't know that its a lot better than Konqueror in this respect, but if all they are doing is finding their files, and doing Office type work, this is one thing they do not have problems with.

I usually put one task bar at the bottom, with the apps in it, a desktop switcher, the calendar, and the little dock for the open apps. They never seem to have problems finding their way around, so Gnome must be doing something right. At least, for them.

Man...

[geekoid]

I was hoping for a Jules Verne post.

I stopped GNOME because of Nautilus 1.0

[ex-geek]

I stopped using GNOME much earlier. Version 1.4 of GNOME added Nautilus 1.0 and it was dog sloooow. I had a 400 Mhz machine at the time and it took Nautilus 30 sec to open my home directory.

Anybody remember Eazel? This is the company which initially wrote Nautilus and spent millions of VC cash doing so. What was their business plan again?

Hail to ROX!

[kYsis]

Rox is by far the coolest file manager. And enlightenment 17 (even if still unstable) pwns gnome!

Re:Hail to ROX!

[Anonymous Coward]

I must completely agree with that.
Although, in gnome/nautilus defense, gnome is a full blown Desktop Environment where E17/sawfish/insert_your_wm_here are "only" window managers + (optional) file manager. That is the combination I like though: one wm that does what it does well *plus* a fm that does what it does well is ALL I need. I've totally abandoned gnome and kde in favor for sawfish + Rox myself.

Re:Hail to ROX!

[angrykeyboarder]

Rox annoys me. I don't know why but I just can't get used to it.

Franky the best GTK2 file manager is Gnome Commander (only recently GTK2).

But I still prefer Konqueror or Krusader to anything GTK.

Latest version?

[admp]

The latest version of Nautilus is 2.14.0, which is included in Fedora Core 5...

Well, I have Ubuntu Dapper now, and:

admp@sols:~$ apt-cache policy nautilus
nautilus:
Installed: 2.14.1-0ubuntu6

Re:Latest version?

[angrykeyboarder]

It's always amusing what slips by the editors, isn't it?

Useless for whom?

[Roadkills-R-Us]

I avoided all the desktops for years. I really don't care for any of them. I still use a heavily customized twm at home. But when I switched from development to an IT environment where I have to support users who mostly have GNOME on the desktop, I started using it at work. And there's a lot I don't know about it even after three years (it's a tiny part of the job). So I learned a few things. I'm still on SL3 (RHEL3 from source), but I'd never realized there was an SMB URI, which is handy to know.

One thing I never got was the whole "spatial" thing. Woooo, spatial! It sounds like 3D or something, but it's just the same old thing that's been around forever. Some people like it, some don't. But giving it a marketing style name and jabbering away about it like you just solved Fermatt's Last Cryptic Note to the Cleaners is kind of stupid.

wrong-o

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean to say that overlapping tiled windows by the dozen just to get to a single file while roaming around is easier than a simple tree view for a n00b?

HAHAHAHAHA! Shenanigans! Gnome got beat up all over the net over that decision, because they deserved it! KISS keep it simple. Mac had a few nice design features in the past, that wasn't one of them though, and certainly was a major mistake on the gnome devs part to try and mimic that idea. It was "busy"-needlessly busy-counter intutitive, had no immediate obvious way to initiate actions with whatever you were looking for even if you could find it, was cramped, used extra resources needlessly and was just plain *icky*.

  *One* window,a basic and normal tree menu, a well thought out and easily understood way to see how this or that relates in its positioning. Already well established in the user/luser spectrum, nothing "new" to figger out, no extra crap to look at or guess at "what was under the third window down in this tile pile again???") nonsense.

Really, you want more instant features from any window that is opened? You have two quick ways to do it. Cram as many buttons oand input bars on it that you can, OR, use the right button menu system, which is MUCH mo better for past around just a few input features on any normal app window. If you are using a mouse for most of the work, keep the actions in the customized mouse menu, people will find it. Keep your work window uncluttered with some extra space and room to move. MOST people don't like 85 things opened in front of them, it's like driving down a street just chock full of neon signs, after a certain threshold, you stop seeing them and just see "big ugly mess".

Hidden Power?

[Schugy]

There's no hidden power, there's just incomplete documentation and limited usability. But I really doubt that these 9 things aren't mentioned anywhere. And these Special URLs are are just like in Konqueror .Maybe Nautilus would be still useful for common tasks if I didn't use Konqueror all the time. But I didn't know how to get rid of the gnome-desktop in ICEWM when nautilus was started.

Item no 10: Nautilus is a crock of shit

[vandan]

Nautilus can't perform simple tasks such as deleting files and folders:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108307

The above bug is only 3 years old, however. Give it time ...

Considering the above, in what sense do we call nautilus a 'file manager'? We could call it a 'filesystem approximator' or something. I'm running a small ( 8 PC ) Linux-on-the-desktop testbed in our sales department. They've all got gnome desktops. But we have to use konqueror as the file manager! Sad but true.

So that's why it's so hard to use!

[It's a thing]

"It was created by a company called Eazel, staffed by ex-Apple programmers that wanted to bring ease of use to the Linux desktop."

In the Apple world, "easy to use" means "you have to try every single option to finally find what you want after ripping your hair out in frustration because nothing in the UI makes sense."

its a dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

it was on digg. i agree that digg had it after /., but who reads /. first theses days anyway

A Simple Question

[Tellalian]

Now I use Gnome and Nautilus daily, and like it, so I'm not trolling when I ask why can't it open a simple text file? Now I admit it doesn't happen for every text file, but for some I get the elusive message:

"Cannot open blah.txt
The filename 'blah.txt' indicates that this file is of type 'txt document'. The contents of the file indicate that the file is of type 'plain text document'. If you open this file, the file might present a security risk to your system."

Can anyone explain how a 'txt document' is different from a 'plain text document', or how it presents a security risk? I've reported this as a bug in Gnome's bugzilla, but so far have heard nothing.

Linux in the gym?

[ThePuceGuardian]

When I saw the headline, I at first thought Slashdot's readership had taken up exercise.

Which is rather odd, come to think of it - it's not a subject I've seen brought up much here. In a community this large and diverse you'd expect almost anything to be a topic of discussion at least once. Can it really be true that noone here has any sort of athletic hobbies?

The point

[Bastian]

I'm not asking what's to dislike about spatial mode or other defaults of Nautilus. I'm asking why having to go through changing the default settings into something you prefer is such a roadblock?

Click the checkbox to go to browser mode. Click the checkbox to display the address bar. Doesn't that take away the vast majority of these complaints? You seem to be operating under the assumption that a few mouse clicks is this 30-foot stone wall that stands between you and a file manager that behaves more to your liking.

I don't like spatial mode, either. It is obviously something that made a lot more sense back when desktop computers were smaller and is poorly-suited to the kinds of complex directory hierarchies that people use nowadays, especially on UNIX-type machines. That's why I turned it off.

Re:The point

[facelessnumber]

Okay, you're right. Although I said there are many details that bugged me and ultimately turned me off, the examples I've given in this thread can mostly be disabled. As soon as the devs give us checkboxes labeled "speed this slug the hell up" and "enable tabbed browsing mode" I PROMISE I will give GNOME and Nautilus another chance.