I was just playing with the newest nautilus build (43.rc-e11f9dd5d) . I noticed the “F9” to “show/hide” the sidebar is not working. “F10” shows the “action menu”, but it will not hide it again. The ‘esc’ key will make it go back into hiding.
Are these quirks issues with Nautilus itself or artifacts of running the flatpak version?
I really hope it’s the latter …
Hi! Thanks for testing!
The sidebar now hides automatically when needed, i.e., when the window is narrow. F9 can be used to show/hide it in that situation.
F10 is the standard GNOME shortcut for opening the primary menu. It’s behavior is the same for any GTK4 application using a GtkMenuButton set as primary menu.
That is really disappointing. I rarely have any use for the sidebar and generally keep it hidden.
“F9” still does not work, even with 1 and 2 columns of icons displayed. From my very limited quick test here, it appears to hide if and only if the display shrinks below 1 column and it reappears when the app is wide enough to display the sidebar and 1 column. Thus, as the width shrinks, the number of displayed columns goes from 1 to 2, down to 1. The other direction: up to 2, down to 1 as the sidebar comes back, and up from there …
I find this clunky, but at least it looks really cool 
Right. This is a problem right now: we the only way to make the sidebar hide earlier is to set a larger minimum width on the view (showing more columns). But this would mean the window couldn’t shrink as narrow as otherwise it can. A tricky problem.
I’ll look into whether I can set a “natural” width for the content, without forcing a minimum, and have the sidebar fold when there is not enough space for the natural width of the view otherwise.
Quick correction.
“F9” does work once the sidebar is hidden. It stops working as soon as the sidebar reappears.
I really hope it will be any easy hack to get the normal “F9” back!
I think your concern is not with the keyboard shortcut, but with the ability to change the application UI design to your preference.
In previous versions, there was an option to hide the sidebar, as a way to allow making windows narrower.
Now that we can get narrow automatically, the option to manually hide the sidebar is no longer needed.
Yes! You are one hundred percent correct.
My concern is absolutely about setting the application to my preference. This is important. I have no need to see the sidebar shortcuts most of the time. When not needed, it is wasted space.
While I genuinely like the minimalist approach to ui design employed by nautilus, and gnome more generally, I think it has been taken too far. End users do have preferences, most of which are fairly simply and obvious.
Your reply implies that hiding the sidebar is only useful in the case of a window being too narrow to display it. There are other use cases!
Example:
Side-by-side viewing. Compare the contents of two directories by opening two instances and placing them beside one another. (Nautilus used to have a feature that allowed this within a singe instance, Nemo still does.) Are two sidebars needed, or are they a distraction from the task being performed?
I’m sure I could think of other use cases as well, but my point is that the feature to hide the sidebar at will is not only a matter of preference, but also genuinely useful.
I know. I have my own preferences too. Some aspects of the UI of this application are not as I would have preferred. But that’s no reason to add options. Even UI designers each have their own preferences, but still settle on a single one in the end.
Use cases are indeed a much more useful argument!
If I resize the tiled windows, the sidebar in the middle gets out of the way automatically. The end result resembles nemo’s dual pane feature.
Nice! Thanks for the tip
Unfortunately, it is not working for me. Does it only work on wayland? (I’m currently on X … easier for gnome-shell hacking)
It should work on X too. Allow me to clarify that you need to manually resize the tiled windows (thankfully, in gnome-shell, when you resize one tiled window, the window on the other size automatically resizes too).
Hello and thanks for the response.
I finally had time to revisit the alleged ( ) side-by-side viewing side-bar-hiding this morning and still no joy! Perhaps I will have better luck if and when I build it locally. I hope to have the time this weekend , but who knows …
Nonetheless, I think the auto-hide feature is a very cool, but ultimately terrible idea. No amount of programming talent could possible anticipate when I may or may not wish to see the sidebar. I can’t imagine a way to implement this feature that is not clunky.
The animation provided below portrays a much better, but still undesirable, version of this feature:
This same source strongly implies that “emblems” are coming back, but I see no evidence of this running the nightly build. I hope better support for custom emblems does come back … it really is annoying to have to use both Nemo and Nautilus, as well as the command line, to actually make use of the features baked into gvfs (or whatever it is called) …
cheers
I think what we have there is someone with a blog and an overactive imagination, that screenshot simply shows how existing ‘emblems’ are displayed in 43.
e.g., here they are in 42
So ‘nothing new’ there
Not really anything to do gvfs (or gio, the ‘frontend’ via which backends such as gvfs are consumed) per se, from it’s perspective it isn’t any different to any other arbitrary attribute you decide to attach to a file — Just so happens that Nautilus looks to see if a key exists, and then interprets it.
I think what we have there is someone with a blog and an overactive imagination …
I suspected as much, but I still hoped …
Not really anything to do gvfs …
True enough! I probably could have found better words to express the idea of utilizing gvfs.
No, we are not planning to introduce a way to manually add emblems. They are automatically added in some files (like read-only files, links, etc.) and by plug-ins (like the dropbox one) to indicate status.
You can still set a custom icon on files or folders, though. That hasn’t gone away.
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