The Future of Nautilus

Nautilus is always going to be hobbled by the huge padding that gnome's default themes put between text and object borders. It's just hard when you can only fit 50% as much information in the same number of pixels. That was one of the big things that drove me away from Linux and is still an ongoing problem when I have to work with Gnome programs.

Don't remove the "go up a directory button," PLEASE. Finder and Explorer try to mask the file tree structure through little UI gimmicks like this and it drives me crazy.

Better search integration would be great. Improved indexing support via GVFS (or whatever) to make search lightning fast combined with a well placed search bar would make my life easier.

Why does everyone wanna remake nautilus from scratch all of a sudden? This is the third project of this type I've bumped into in the last week. Maybe they should join efforts.

Contextual file manager : http://seilo.geekyogre.com/2010/06/first-sezen-screencast-an...

Log File Manager : http://www.seifsallam.co.cc/2010/06/how-file-manager-should-...

I really wonder why the nautilus developers aren't working the the Elementary[1] developers more. Nautilus-Elementary is basically a fork of nautilus at this point, and already it is much better and does a lot of the things this article proposes to add. It just seems like a bit of a waste of everyone's time.

[1] http://www.elementary-project.com/discover.html

Perhaps a better question: can it start in under 30 seconds? If you don't use Nautilus for your desktop, opening those file browser windows is a serious drag!

I'm curious to know how much user testing goes into the design of the Gnome desktop environment (and KDE, for that matter). Designing a visually elegant interface is one thing, but that can mean nothing during actual user interaction.

Is it this http://www.xfce.org/projects/thunar/ ?

Why not ditch Nautilus and use directly Rox, or thunar instead? :)