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The lack of typeahead in GtkFileChooser is my biggest annoyance that I've ever come across. Ever since I started using computers nearly 25 years ago I used typeahead to navigate through directories and I can't imagine doing it otherwise. The idea of removing typeahead is anti-human to me, I couldn't adapt even though I really tried to.

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Yeah, the first thing I do after installing Linux has always been to replace nautilus with something else.

Nautilus is pretty, and for the most part fairly nice. But lacking typeahead just makes it unusable.

Which makes me think the biggest problem with the file selector as described is not that it's flawed, but that it's hard to replace.

One of the thing I loved about the Amiga was that because of how the API was structured, it was easy to replace things like this, as you could patch every API endpoint. As a result, it took very little time before more advanced replacements for the standard file requester appeared. You "just" had to patch (via OS-provided functions) a couple of library calls.

So true. That is the biggest concern that I have with Linux overall.

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