How can I change what items are shown on the Places sidebar?

[bluelhf]

I don’t have a use for some items in the Places sidebar, and I’d like to be able to remove them:

I know I can add bookmarks to the sidebar, so I can technically already add items to it, but I haven’t figured out how to remove the default items such as “Documents” or “Starred”.

I’ve tried writing some files in the ~/.config directory as recommended by some StackExchange threads I found:

~/.config/user-dirs.conf
enabled=false

~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're
# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run.
# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
# absolute path. No other format is supported.
# 
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

but to no avail. I’ve also tried deleting the directories Nautilus points its sidebar entries to, but that just made the sidebar entries display an error pop-up when clicked on, instead of disappearing like I’d hoped.

How would I go about changing what items are shown in the sidebar?

[andyholmes]

From what I can see there is no good way. There might be a way with some CSS trickery and the :nth-child() selector, but I’d expect that to be flaky at best.

[p3732 (Peter Eisenmann)]

You can change the variables in the user-dirs.conf to point to only “$HOME”, that will hide them.

The full hiding and reordering of the sidebar feature is somewhat planned, but still has multiple roadblocks to overcome.

[bluelhf]

Thanks! Setting the directories to point to $HOME in user-dirs.conf, running xdg-user-dirs-update and restarting Nautilus like you suggested worked :​)