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

[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

[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?

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:Kan it run in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean "insensitive klod"?

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?

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: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