Feature Request - Pin folders to the top in the Nautilus File Manager

It would be great to be able to pin folders to the top of the Nautilus File Manager, like in Nemo. I prefer Nautilus generally but feel like currently I’m forced to use Nemo because this feature is absent.

Some other people looking for this feature:

Note that Bookmarking is not a viable alternative. I need to pin files per folder and not to have some massive overview with all the files that are “pinned” across many directories.

This was also explained well by user Meutrei:

" The Favorites menu is Global, showing folders from all locations, so it doesn’t help me. I work daily on 5 -10 projects which I have them in the Sidebar, each of these projects has several folders, and daily 2 or 3 folders are priority, so I pin the folders in that project to display at the top. The pinned folders are not for a long time, so I Pin and Unpin folders daily. It’s simple, the Pinned folders are a priority in that Project."

in his previous (closed) feature request


Another solution would be allowing sorting by multiple parameters in case of tie breakers including tags. If we could put tagged items first (while still sorting ties by whatever we want) we could use that to keep our “favorites” to the top.

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maybe could also be possibility to reorganize all folder inluding default ones or could be checkbox which of default ones are enabled, but GNOME devs has some weird opinion what is defaults…

You can already do this, in general:

  • You can activate “Sort Folders Before Files” in Nautilus’ preferences dialog
  • You can “star” files (and folders) and sort the view by starred/non-starred status, instead of sorting by name/type/etc.

For search specifically, I have an enhancement request for starred items to always show at the top of search results, as developers were open to that idea: Starred items should show at the top of global/recursive search results (#3189) · Issues · GNOME / Files · GitLab

I don’t know if they would be open to the idea of stars behaving as pins in regular (non-search) folders where sorting is available, however.

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Edited: I found how to star. There was no right click menu item available but I finally found that changing to the list view shows clickable stars on the right most column.

Unfortunately it is as I feared. It seems to be impossible to sort by starred/non-starred and THEN (sort ties) by last Modified. That makes it very inconvenient to work with “Starred” sorting. (Please correct me if I misunderstood and there is a way to get Starred items at the top and sort by some other property of choice.)


And thanks for trying anyway!

I need the same function and I’m looking for ways to make it work, I would like to put my folders at the top, a tag filter would be perfect too.