Nautilus
I like Nautilus, the Gnome file manager. Having said this, I’m trying to not refer to it as “Nautilus“; I’d like the fact that it’s an application to disappear. Like the Mac, I’d like it to just be that my desktop shows folders. Not “my desktop starts Nautilus to show the contents of a folder“. The Nautilus window is the folder. It’s all spatial, see?
Anyway, a gripe and a wish about this non-existent application.
The gripe is: Ctrl+T is bound to “Send to Trash“. This is an unbelieveably shit idea, because Ctrl+T is “New Tab” in Firefox. So, if you hit Ctrl-T when you think that your Firefox window is focused, but instead a folder has the focus, then whatever is selected gets deleted. This is the World’s Worst Idea. One of the things you’re supposed to do when implementing new stuff is look at the failure modes; what if it goes wrong? Now, this is, of course, not the Nautilus people’s fault, and neither is it the Firefox people’s fault. It’s just unfortunate. What is not unfortunate, though, is that there is no way to change that Nautilus keybinding. I’m not asking for keys to be arbitrarily rebindable: this is not KDE we’re talking about. But I can’t make it go away, and today I deleted two folders by mistake because of it. Fortunately, I could fish them back out of the Trash. Unfortunately, the Trash is crap; the Windows Recycle Bin is a lot, lot better, because things in the Recycle Bin know where they came from and can be put back there with a mouse click. The Trash is just another folder somewhere, as far as I can tell. And if you delete something by mistake, because it was highlighted, you don’t know what it was that you deleted. It’s only because I know the folder that was showing well that I could pull out of my head what the thing I’d deleted was. This is bad, and I do not know how to fix it.
Update: it seems to be removed in later versions of Nautilus. It went away in version 1.647.4.3, as can be seen from the diff (search for “accelerator =” to find the line that disappears), even though, rather bizarrely, the changelog doesn’t really say anything about it. Anyway, looks like it’ll be gone in 2.10, which I’ll get when hoary gets stable.
The wish is: can we have TortoiseSVN for Gnome, please please please? It’d be really handy. The “nautilus-python”: bindings should make it pretty easy to handle this—Nautius already supports WebDAV, after all—but they seem to be pretty new and untried and (more importantly) not packaged for Ubuntu, more’s the pity. People are using them for cool stuff like displaying Creative Commons licences that apply to particular files and I want some of that customise-my-folders action. Especially if I can make folders know that they are Subversion working copies.
Sorry to disappoint you, but if you search the diff forT you’ll find the new code that sets the same accelerator through some other system. The changelog mentions “Initial port of views to GtkUIManager“, so I guess that’s what that other system is.
2 days later
Hm. That should beT there, not just T. That’ll teach me to actually look at the preview: “Don’t forget to look right before posting!”
2 days later
Matijs: Can I assume you were having a bit of trouble posting some code there? I’m working on fixing that…
2 days later
Heh. Yes. The second time the preview was fine, but the result wasn’t. It should be control T, with control between angled brackets.
4 days later
Thnx! Now I know why my file dissappear when I hit Ctrl + T to open a new tab in Firefox, but nautilus got the focus.
76 weeks later
Is there any fix to the ctrl+T issue yet?
111 weeks later
This CTRL+T shortcut is still active in Nautilus 2.18.1 and is very unfortunate. I have the same problem with Firefox mixups. Very hard to find information on it or other people that are bothered by this, and it’s disheartening to see this has been going on for years. Why would anyone want CTRL+T anyway when the delete key is right there.
128 weeks later
Since Nautilus uses GTK you can disable/change the keyboard accelerators for any command; first enable editing with
System->Preferences->Appearance->Interface->Editable menu shortcuts
then open a Nautilus window, highlight a file, pull down Edit menu, move mouse to “Move to the deleted items folder” and hit the delete key. You’ve just removed the Ctrl-T binding.
My gripe with Nautilus is that it grabs both left and right buttons on the desktop (I mean the empty parts of the desktop). OK, I can put up with the crap menu that pops up with right-click, but why does it have to hog left-click which does nothing apart from unselect the icons on the desktop? I’d like to bind it to another menu, of course.
161 weeks later
Posting this a little late I supposed, but with Ubuntu Hardy Heron, I can’t set any accelerators using the “Editable menu shortcuts” feature. It works for other programs such as gedit, but not nautilus. I’m assuming you all have the same problem.
177 weeks later