I’m on fedora,
how to show/‘hide’ or this sidebar, as i have small screen and like to save space.
Hi.
Which version of Fedora are you using?
In Fedora 39 and 40, the ability for the user to choose when the sidebar is shown has been removed. I think maybe it changed in 37 or 38 actually. I can’t remember.
If you grab and drag the window a bit, the window should automatically resize a bit and hide the sidebar, so you get something roughly like how you have your Files instances laid out. Like this :
Doing this is of course, a horrible kludge, creating mental work, wasting time, creating a cluttered view, decreasing utility.
It’s not possible. Adding UI to make this possible would create a number of less-than-ideal design compromises.
You can instead hide the extra time columns to get more space for the file name.
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Maybe we should also limit the number of columns that can be added at the same time. The ability to add too many columns is causing you a lot more trouble than not being able to hide the sidebar.
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Hiding columns can add a bit of space, of course one cannot hide the columns one is using to do the work!
I often hide all the columns and when I do, I wish for the ability for each folder to remember it’s own unique view settings, and rue the loss of the very fast column chooser widget from Files 42. It was so quick and easy.
The only column I can’t easily hide, when obtainting the maximum space possible by hiding columns, is the “Starred” column. Perhaps hiding that could be made simpler in future releases.
Many thanks for the hard work on the 46 release by the way.
Stars are a fake column. And they are narrower than any other column anyway.
When I say limit the number of visible columns, I mean it depending on window width. Clearly I would want to limit the ability to view more columns in a maximized window.
The list view in general is failing to adapt to narrow windows. I think we need a narrow list “mode” with a layout which optimizes the space usage.
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Columns are not the problem. The sidebar is a pain in the ass for icon view as well, where columns are not present.
This is a very common layout for folder comparison and transfer. Without the sidebar here, I would have a fourth icon on each row. That’s a significant reduction of the amount of content that can be shown at once.
Resize a bit and…
narrow mode triggers for one of the windows. And design doesn’t seem to be an issue there, is it? Most of the time, I use the sidebar once to get to my browsing starting point, and then I’m done with it. Don’t force it on me permanently.
So, this/these topic(s) has come up many times in the past, and it is unlikely to see these requested changes take place.
As I’ve finally switched after a decade of Thunar, I too was confronted with these issues.
For now, I carry a set of 4 trivial patches addressing exactly these concerns, and build each nautilus release myself.
- Add column chooser item to toggle/hide the Star Column
- Remove “Starred” category from Sidebar
- Reduce Sidebar max width, as there is a ton of empty horizontal space to gain for us split-pane folks.
- Increase maximum thumbnail size to 384px - when I want large Grid View to sort photos.
Fortunately they each still apply cleanly on 46.0.
Don’t mis-interpret this reply. I love nautilus and diligently follow the much-appreciated hard work of the developers. My workaround is simply to code-around.
@tekstryder is right: the proposal to hide the sidebar manually is not new and has been rejected by designers on more than one occasion, with solid rationale. I don’t want to waste any more of my time beating a dead horse.
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oops. deleted previous post by mistake.
do you have a link to the designers, whoever they are, reasoning behind removing the sidebar hiding feature please? I found it quite a useful feature.
for people who are new to gnome and the open source world in general, it’s a bit like walking into a film half way through.
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it’s cool that folk like yourself have the skills to patch things to suit themselves, but for non-technical folk like myself, it’s rather tricky to aquire the skills in a timeframe conducive to getting stuff done. probably years!
From what I remembered, I believe the problem was about not having the sidebar show/hide icon to the left of the navigation arrows, in order to not impedes their use.
Looking at the screenshots, despite not having such use case, I concur this looks strange when having multiple windows (non-uniform look as some can have, some others not), or when using tiling but wanting maximum space for the main view. And resizing every time in such circumstances is certainly not convenient.
On design (visuals) side, the only thing I see is to go by default with the two bars of the adaptive version. However, we can wonder if it is “acceptable” to have a button permanently pushed, and certainly other details to figure out, including how it affects regular and adaptive versions. After that, there is code and maintainability.
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the only reason i could not search old one is due to me lacking searching knowledge and keywords.
but if you say so, then this post will make no sense.
I understand. A lot of these discussions happen in chat (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s the best medium to discuss ideas IMO) so there isn’t an easy way to let you"replay" the missed parts.
Then again, if every time a new person comes and wants to bargain on a design choice, designers would be doomed to keep discussing the same things all over again instead of being productive.
“Designers, I’ve come to bargain”
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Me and my small braincells, what you write is not understandable, also getting context, reading top chats.
Both Discourse and Gitlab have decent search functionality.
The keywords you used to title this thread could be a good start.
Would you feel comfortable sharing your patches?
Sure, possibly. I’ll rebase when 46.1 is tagged and try to remember this post.
When I say “trivial”, I mean it… no extra code is required. It’s all just modified existing code or values.
So, if you’re comfortable patching/building from source, you could also likely achieve the same modifications by poking around as I did. I never worked professionally with C… not my wheelhouse.