In current versions of Nautilus, the hamburger menu is located in the sidebar (it is a sidebar and not a utility pane, right?).
To me, this is quite odd for various reasons:
- In many other apps, the hamburger menu is located on the right, next to the close button. (This is also indicated as preferred in the HIG for header bars).
- The hamburger menu contains options that are dependent on view mode. Specifically, Icon Size depends on the toggle for grid/list view. I’m not sure if the HIG says anything about this, but I generally expect some sort of left-to-right pattern here.
- (closely related to 2), the icon size and view type toggle are currently very far apart. I would expect options like those, that are fairly related to each other, to be located close to each other.
- On small windows, Nautilus now requires the user to first open the sidebar before they can open the hamburger menu.
In other apps, such as Tweaks, it seems the hamburger menu is also located in the sidebar. While I don’t find this ideal there either, it is at least understandable to me because it leads to a more obvious pattern on small screens (where the sidebar is the ‘primary’ view, whereas in Nautilus the main view remains primary), alleviating issue 4. In addition the hamburger menu is way less important in Tweaks, and issue 2/3 are not present for it.
For 1, some HIG guidelines for combining headerbars, sidebars and menus might be nice, presuming there indeed aren’t any and I didn’t just read over them.
As a user, my preferred solution would however be to place hamburger menus to the right of the headerbar, even in the presence of a sidebar.