Nautilus

Alexander Larsson recently committed his work on the permissions page in Nautilus. He writes: I just commited a rework of the permissions page in the file property dialog. It has a simplified UI (and an advanced/unixy version availible via a gconf setting) and support for recursive permission changes.

Screenshot 1 | Screenshot 2 | Screenshot 3 | Screenshot 4

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. That's the one I poked with a stick.

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I'm happy to announce that it is now possible to share your actions created for Nautilus-actions on its web site.

Nautilus-actions is an extension for Nautilus, the GNOME file manager. It allows the addition of arbitrary programs to be launched through the Nautilus popup menu on files that are selected.

With the new "Import/Export" feature introduced in the last 1.0 release, you can easily share your favorite actions with each other and to ease this, there is now an official repository.

Happy sharing !

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Christian Neumair has posted an overview of some of the work he is doing with regards to changing file permissions within Nautilus. A very good read for those that are interested.

Update: Also news of ACL support in Nautilus.

Nearly six months after its first announcement, here is a new major release of Nautilus actions.

Nautilus actions is an extension for Nautilus, the GNOME file manager. It allows the addition of arbitrary programs to be launched through the nautilus popup menu on files that are selected.

A lot of work has been done since then to make it better integrated into GNOME with the use of GConf for the configuration storage and a HIGified interface amongst other things.

Alexander Larsson wrote: The last two weeks I have been working on the nautilus-search (and now nautilus-search2) branch of Nautilus. The initial code in this branch was written by andersca and was later maintained by joe. It had a pluggable search interface with a beagle implementation that let you easily search for files from Nautilus. Places->Search in the menu would give you a text entry in the toolbar, and when you typed text there the matches was shown in the normal directory view....

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US PBS TV have a new show called NerdTV. The first episode posted is an interview with industry legend Andy Hertzfeld. Andy founded Eazel a company which was involved in GNOME development leading to up GNOME 2.0. Andy's history at Apple and his work with Eazel on GNOME is discussed in the program. The NerdTV show is available for download under a Creative Commons license. It is available in various formats, but unfortunatly it is not available in Ogg format yet, hopefully they get around to adding that soon.

Nautilus actions is an extension for Nautilus, the gnome file manager. It allow to configure program to be launch on files selected into Nautilus interface.

Feel free to visit the project page here.

The first publicly distributed packages are available in the Download section as source tarball and RPMS for Fedora Core 4.

Some screenshots are available here

Some new enhancements are finding their way into Nautilus. The first is new tree functionality complete with auto-expand for dnd to the spatial Nautilus list view, much like what is seen here on a Mac. Nautilus now has the ability to create a new file when dragging and dropping text into a Nautilus window. The next enhancement is a patch that adds GTK2 Bookmarks like seen in the new GTK file chooser to Nautilus. Also this patch adds a new sidepanel plug-in for the Nautilus browser that mimics the GTK FileChooser. And finally this patch adds the pathbar as seen in the GTK2 file chooser to the Nautilus browser. Screenshot of the latter 2 features mentioned is here.

Here's yet another one (hopefully last) editorial article on the Navigational Vs Spatial user interfaces. Also, according to this poll (as of the moment I am writing this), 47% hate the spatial way of doing things, while 25% love it.

Christian Paratschek is weighing the pros and cons of the spatial paradigm on user interfaces.

Radoslaw Sokol wrote an editorial for OSNews supporting the spatial Nautilus and all its values as a modern system.

During the nautilus 2.4 cycle there was some discussion on
nautilus-list about the "Object Oriented" metaphor vs. the "Navigation
Metaphor". That thread started at
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2002-September/msg00093.html
(read that mail if you need an introduction to the OO and Navigation
metaphors).
Our general opinion coming out of that thread was that the Object
Oriented metaphor was probably easier to learn, and built a stronger
conceptual model for users, but that the convenience benefits of a
navigation window outweighed those.

There is a new patch written by Jürg discussed on the Nautilus mailing list wich implements multiple root in the tree view. The corresponding bug is 62524. I backported the patch from 2.3.3 to 2.2.3.1 so that everybody who doesn't use bleeding edge Gnome can still enjoy it. For now there are no way to add roots at runtime, but you can edit the source to add a new root before compiling. You just have to copy some lines.
Thank you, Jürg, for this piece of code.

Dave Camp wrote:

I just checked in the following patch to add a Keep Aligned mode to the
desktop in nautilus. When you switch to this mode, existing icons will
snap to a grid. While in this mode, dropped icons will snap to grid
locations automatically. I'd like people to build it and give it a
whirl.