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Comment by jiehong | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of not being able to right click in Files in list view for creating a new document or pasting something, because it only accepts a right click in an empty area. Yet, in list view, as soon as you have a few files and the window is full, you’re given no empty area to click in.

I saw some people have the same issue [0] in the past, and it’s not really been fixed either [1].

[0]: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1150025

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/3445

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I always had the same issue, even with the file explorer that I'm using currently (Thunar, XFCE's file browser). I never really looked for a solution, I kept changing the view (go from list view to to icons view) in order to find some empty space to right-click on.

Your comment and seeing that there are bug reports about it prompted me to think more than 5 seconds about this usability annoyance. I found a cool shortcut on Thunar: holding the control key + right click anywhere (including on a file) will bring up the right-click menu, from where I can create a new folder, paste, open in the terminal...

That's XFCE's Thunar solution to this problem. It was just not easily discoverable, but it's a good enough solution according to me, as I don't mind using the keyboard. Maybe it's the same on Gnome's File or Nautilus or other file explorers softwares, I don't know.

Edit: looking at it more closely, in Thunar the ctrl+right-click will show the "create new folder" option only if no file is selected. Otherwise it shows the contextual menu of the selection (hence the create new folder would not appear). So basically we have to unselect the files ... by clicking on an empty area (so back to square one) ... or we have to know about another keyboard shortcut (the "Escape" key) to clear the current selection before doing the ctrl+righ-click. Not ideal either.

Can't you use ctrl-left click to deselect the selected file before using ctrl-right click to get the context menu?

Yes, sure. Although if multiple files or folders are selected, it's probably easier to just press the Escape key once instead of searching for each selected objects in the folder to unselect them one by one. What I was looking for was a reproducible way to make this right click menu appear. The sequence Escape+ctrl+righclick is a way to do that, it always work, wherever the cursor is, and no matter if the folder has many files or not. No need to look actively for a couple of empty pixels anymore or to think "What do I have to unselect before I can right-click to get a different contextual menu?".

I've noticed a similar thing on some web pages. For example BBC news where the link for a story is its whole tile/rectangle area, the obvious link text, any picture, and a large amount of white space. It's only relatively thin gaps between tiles that are inert background to click on.

I can see this making sense for a touch-first design and I can appreciate that focus for BBC news website, however focusing back on software like gnome it seems that similar aims crept in trying to make it serve multiple input methods at the same time and how you could have variations on the UI for touch or mouse (and you could also make assumptions about the screen and viewing setup and what's appropriate)

There seems to be space to right click between the rows (although somewhat small space at the smallest list view), and left-right sides of the window.

There is an image showing the right clickable areas on the issue you linked

https://gitlab.gnome.org/-/project/1/uploads/50ac36ab40f9049...

I often try to open a new Terminal window in my current folder like that. Which often is impossible for the same reason. So I navigate up, until I find a folder that is not full, open the Terminal there, and ‚cd‘ down to the folder i wanted…

You can click on the three dot menu at the right of the path, there is an option to open a terminal. You can also switch to icon view and right-click between icons to open a terminal. You can also go to parent folder, right click the folder you were before and open it in a terminal. Many workarounds but I agree it’s not really good UI.

> You can click on the three dot menu at the right of the path, there is an option to open a terminal.

I use Black Box as a terminal app, but Nautilus will open only default distro-provided terminal application with its menu.

Yea, there currently isn't exactly any way for selecting what application is considered a terminal other than hardcoding a list (which IIRC gnome-shell does). There is an open MR on xdg-specs[1] to address this, which seems to have stalled

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/merge_request...

Why don't you change your default terminal in update-alternatives (if you are the sole user of thia computer) or gsettings then?

I find this debatable from a UI/UX perspective. I think that the designers made the right choice here, because a context menu should show actions which can be applied to the object I right clicked on. "New Document" isn't really some function of a file or folder icon. Even worse: when I right click on a folder, should the "New Document" menu item create a new doc in the current folder? Or in the one I clicked on?

It would be better to have these common tasks in a separate menu item in the icon bar where they are always available, in addition to the context menu when right clicking on empty space in a window.

Nah, no different from 'Create Row Below' or some such. Hunting for white space to click in order to act on the directory is like hunting for the borders in a spreadsheet or table to click in order to add a new row

> It would be better to have these common tasks in a separate menu item in the icon bar where they are always available, in addition to the context menu when right clicking on empty space in a window.

In GNOME Files they are! It’s the folder menu - the one that’s connected to the location bar.

It isn’t the most beautifully discoverable of menus, but it works well, and it’s worth noting the menus have been rearranged a bit in 47.

Interesting opinion. I think it would be so much less confusing to have only one menu. The easiest for power-users and newcomers alike would be to put on the top of this unique right-click menu the folder-level options (create new folder, open terminal here, paste here, ...), and the selection-specific options bellow. This way it would be predictable and we can build habits (muscle memory).

But you're right it's debatable. A matter of preference. I guess I'm just in the camp of "more explicit is better than implicit". And I'm willing to pay the verbosity cost (having a longer menu in this case). The alternative seems like a complex decision tree to me: Am I in list-view? Yes. Is my folder full of files? Yes. What menu do I need, depending on the task I want to accomplish? I want to create a new folder. Ah, so I have to find some empty pixels to conjure the menu with that option...

> It would be better to have these common tasks in a separate menu item in the icon bar where they are always available,

And which icon shall have this menu ? Points and lines are already taken. /s

i have that problem in my browser (firefox)

too many tabs and i cant right click the top bar and reopen a closed tab, or whatever

the small empty spot between the tabs and the minimize/close buttons, provide a different right click menu

I think this is the same behavior in Finder on MacOS. Sometimes right clicking requires some pixel-perfect sniping to hit just the right spot.

As cocoto pointed out in one of the child comments, you can click the three dots left of the search button, that one always works. I found out about it today.

almost on cue, i think they removed that functionality from the latest version

left side of the list has a small column with a blank space... sure it requires mouse movement if you are not close with your pointer

i would love the empty area right click menu despite if we clicked on a file, like Blender shows all options for Vertex/Edge/Faces (each right click menu arranged horizontally) if you have all of them selected on Select Mode when editing objects

There is actually a small gap between the list items where you can right click.

You can tell you're on the gap when no item is highlighted.

Common issue. In this situation I use the main menu/hotkeys instead. Ctrl-N, Ctrl-C etc.

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