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Nine Things You Should Know About Nautilus
lessthan0 writes "The Nautilus program in GNOME is not only the default file manager, it creates and manages the desktop. While it looks simple on the surface, there is a lot of hidden power under the shell. The latest version of Nautilus is 2.14.0, which is included in Fedora Core 5. article covers a few non-obvious things about how Nautilus works."
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.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
The only thing I've ever bothered to learn about Nautilus is how to disable it after every upgrade.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Don't you mean "insensitive klod"?
One: Adding Delete .Trash-uid directory if you move a file to the trash, as long as you have the file permissions.
/. sue for copyright infringement? Or is it DRM? Or is it just some Trashy slander?
The ~/.Trash directory is where files are moved if you delete local files. On mounted volumes, Nautilus will create a hidden
So will
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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).
42.
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.
i wish i was but oh well
OK, that was a completely useless article.
- 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).
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
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.
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.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
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.
/usr/bin directory and then click on the thing you want and click "open" or something. C'mon. That's horrid.
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'
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?
Visit my blog http://www.protocolostomy.com
troll? hello? Eazel made natilus and went under immediatly after 1.0 was released.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
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
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
The most useful tip I know for Nautilus is how to stop it drawing the desktop:
/apps/nautilus/preferences and uncheck the "show_desktop" option.
Launch GConf (gconf-editor on the Dapper command line), navigate to
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.
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.
bueller...bueller...bueller
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.
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.
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.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
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.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Nine things I should know ? Sorry but there's only one thing I know about Nautilus and that's that I can't stand using it. My reasons:
;)
1 The whole Spatial browsing idea. Yes you can turn it off (The is the first thing I do when I come across it) but it's a rotten idea. You can tell it's a rotten idea from the recent introduction of the "expanding folders" paradigm which is attempting to return "left hand " tree view functionality into the "single pane" spatial paradigm. Spatial browsing should have been left with the early MACs and the Atari, Amiga etc.
2 Poor keyboard support. My main gripe with Nautilus is that you can't navigate by pressing a key to "walk round objects whose name starts with a letter" as you can in Konqueror, Windows Explorer etc. etc. For me this makes finding files a complete pain in the arse. It's such basic obvious, useful functionality I can't believe it's missing.
3 Poor right mouse button support. Select some files and try to right click so you can select the "copy" option from the context menu. You can't. As soon as you right click then your current selection is discarded and the item nearest the mouse pointer is selected. This also has the added effect of changing the right click context menu. Great.
4 Similarly when you've got several files/directories on the clipboard and you want to paste them into a folder with a mouse click you can't. The right click once again selects an item etc. etc.
Personally I find Nautilus to be the single biggest impediment to me using Linux as my primary O/S. I run Ubuntu and for some reason Konqueror doesn't look quite right. But Nautilus sucks... it's as if the developers have never used a computer with a fully functional file manager.
And yes I have tried raising the issues on Bugzilla but my impression is that the Gnome developers aren't interested in adding functionality. They only seem to be interested in simplifying things as much as possible ("Oh that might be difficult for some users to use so we're not adding it...")
But in the time honoured tradition of open source I've given up on Nautilus and have started writing my own file manager using Mono (not being a proficient C# coder it'll take me a while) It'll probably be pretty crappy in general but it'll at least allow me to perform my file management in a sensible way.
On day the Gnome desktop will have been reduced to a single button and then you'll be happy
Ho hum, c'est la Vie.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
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.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Come on, fellow Slashdotter. That's:
Remember, pardner: anonymous dicts are your friends. And way more 1337.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I was hoping for a Jules Verne post.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on