Quite a little interesting tidbit on Planet GNOME today. As we all know, the default file manager for the GNOME desktop is Nautilus. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, it does have this odd interface where actually more screen space is dedicated to controls and buttons than to the actual part that matters: your files. As part of Ubuntu’s Papercuts project, a fix has been worked on.
The fix stems from the discussion around papercut “Nautilus file browser toolbar is complicated, redundant, and ugly“. The bug is pretty self-explanatory: there is a lot of redundancy in the default Nautilus configuration, and a bit of clean-up is certainly welcome to make the file manager a little less daunting. For instance, the controls for back/forward/etc. take up quite some space, while “Home” and “Computer” shortcuts are located both in the toolbar as well as in the sidebar – where they make sense.
The end result of all this is that the chrome-content ratio for Nautilus-current looks like this:
As you can see, there is room for improvement here. The content area of any application is almost always the most important area, and if your application has more chrome than content then there’s something wrong with your design. Marcus Carlson, therefore, decided to tackle this problem, and after applying his patch, Nautilus looks a little less overwhelming.
The result is a much cleaner Nautilus, a Nautilus which doesn’t waste as much screen real estate in each window. Stop and Reload have been combined, toolbar icon labels are gone, the location breadcrumb bar is moved to the toolbar, and the up and computer button are removed. See the below comparison from my machine – Nautilus on top, compared to Thunar on the bottom:
As you can see, this patch makes Nautilus look almost exactly like Thunar, which can only be seen as a good thing (at least from my perspective). The patch itself has been rejected by upstream, since the Nautilus developers are working on a toolbar customisable during runtime, which is of course preferred to a fixed minimalist design. Carlson just so happens to be working on this editable toolbar as well.
This patch can be applied easily through Carlson’s PPA in Ubuntu. What do you all think? Prefer a minimalist Nautilus, the current layout, or something else completely?
nautilus in spatil mode is more better just need a few things:
#1 dont have open new folder in a new window ( a lest you dont do some key combination or something )
#2 address bar / path bar for know exactly where are you right now
optional : a side bar with disk/favorites/places for that can hidde and unhidde with hotkey and mouse click in some area.
this is just my personal view base in my own needs i am not Design UI guru or something
The article left me scratching my head.
Nothing wrong with Nautilus layout as far as I can see on my own system. Running Fedora 11, vanilla defaults.
http://i30.tinypic.com/t021j9.jpg
Edited 2009-07-21 16:05 UTC
What you show here is a sort of mini-mode Nautilus that I find annoying in Fedora. By default this is what you get when opening something from the desktop, and seems to use its own separate config. It also opens folders in new windows. Don’t get it how this mode is useful and why it’s there.
Wow, you are confused.
This is not a mini-mode or some Fedora thing.
The mode I show in my picture link is the default vanilla Nautilus from GNOME. Spatial mode is the default behavior for GNOME’s Nautilus.
I think you must be one of those Ubuntu users that thinks Ubuntu makes GNOME and so the way they do it is the “right” way?
Edited 2009-07-21 17:55 UTC
One of the first things I do when installing Fedora is change the nautilus behaviour to act more like a browser. I think this decision is rather popular. The default browser-like interface is ugly, as evident in these images. If you prefer the spatial mode, then by all means, there is no problem.
I can’t stand browsing mode with Nautilus, but that is my preference. Look at my picture link. See how clean spatial mode is?
Anyway, my point was that this article is premised upon CHANGING nautilus from its vanilla default and then complaining about that change.
The original designers/coders (The Nautilus guys at GNOME) intend for it to be used in Spatial mode as default.
If you go and change it it something else, then you can’t complain and say that Nautilus has an odd interface that is cluttered. Well, if you used it as it was originally intended, you wouldn’t have the clutter problem (see my pic link). I just think the article needs to be upfront about this instead of making sweeping generalizations about ALL of Nautilus, when in fact you are only complaining about a secondary mode that is not even the design default intended from the developers.
But you can complain about a different interface that is included in nautilus. You’re right that it’s not the default interface, but it’s a popular interface. There’s nothing wrong with improving the browser interface, which a lot of people (including me) prefer. As I mentioned previously, if you prefer the default, spatial interface, then more power to you.
No, it’s making a change to one mode of nautilus. It’s not changing something and then complaining about the change. Yes, spatial is clean, but this is not about making browse mode more like spatial, it’s merely about cleaning the cruft on browser mode.
The article should clarify this as with the text, there is nothing alluding this to only affect the browser mode:
^^that text also uses the word “default” earlier in the blurb, so I had mistakenly assumed it also affected the default mode of nautilus (which is stupid really, as I know that the default is very clean, but such is the power of suggestion).
Edited 2009-07-21 19:15 UTC
I didn’t connect “spatial mode” to that, reading the first comment should’ve made it obvious, my bad.
But no, I do not think “Ubuntu makes GNOME” and neither I use that distro. So far I witnessed spatial mode in Fedora only and directly running Nautilus avoided it. It seems that most distributions I came across are eagerly changing GNOME defaults.
Ubuntu Breezy (or was it Hoary) still used Spatial Mode as default. I was bit surprised when they changed the default to Browser Mode. Back seven or eight years ago I criticized Nautilus as “the world’s slowest File Manager” on OSnews. That was why I used to use XFce 3 with its file manager or Gnome 1.4 with Rox instead of Nautilus. Nautilus is not as desperately slow as it used to be, but PCMan and Thunar are faster.
I think I will switch Nautilus to Spatial Mode and give it a try again. Though I am tempted to return to XFce as my default desktop. When XFce 4 came out I didn’t like it which was one reason why I switched back to Gnome. I a have been trying out XFce 4.6 and it is very good most of the little niggles I had have now gone and Thunar is an excellent file manager.
22″ monitors at 1680×1050 are very cheap and are slowly becoming the norm in much of the industrialized world.
People with impaired eye-sight and new computer users have trouble hitting tiny icons. Big icons are not wasted real-estate in this case.
In summary, smaller is not always better. In general, this patch could do more harm than good, if it cannot be easily reversed. The gnome people should take notice of how KDE has done it.
Dolphin takes just the right amount of space and is easily customizable
dolphin takes up MORE space than nautilus browser mode does
Dolphin’s tool bar and side bars are totally configurable. In my personal setup, Dolphin uses less than half the space for tool bar and side bar than Nautilus does in browser mode.
“Memory is cheap”
“Computers are getting faster”
“Monitors are getting bigger”
Yes, because the desktop is the ONLY place that software is useful, right?
Embedded systems outnumber desktops by orders of magnitude.
why would an embedded system be running nautilus (or gnome)?
sure this 22″ monitor is sure easy to fit in my suitcase(nevermind a backpack) and can run on cheap light battery.
Not everyone use a desktop tower as their main computer.
Perhaps there should be an easy way to adjust icon size, font size, etc. in Nautilus for smaller or larger monitors. My toshiba laptop with a 12″ screen is already short on real estate.
There are increasingly more laptops being sold these days than desktops, and netbooks with tiny 9″ or 10″ displays are also becoming pretty popular. And I can certainly testify that the default file manager window on Ubuntu is bordering on unusable on a 1024×600 screen.
Yeah, I need at least 1024×768 to make GNOME bearable.
Yeah, great, remove the “Up” button and make me remember to press Ctrl-L to activate the text-based address bar. New users will have no idea that they can activate this mode. What a bunch of fantastic ideas :/
Browser mode already disables the traditional location bar, and the up button is pointless with the breadcrumb bar anyway.
True, but you were able to cycle between location / breadcrumb with a button. It wasn’t the most intuitive thing in the world, but a keyboard shortcut isn’t even visible.
That is, if you have it enabled. The breadcrumb is fine to keep track of your browsing history, but it’s useless when you need to “jump” from your current dir to a different one unrelated to your browsing history.
But who am I kidding, it’s not like I’ll start using Nautilus’ GUI, it’s always been a trainwreck (how is one supposed to open a new tab without using the keyboard?). Fortunately, using it with a keyboard is still possible.
I totally agree. Nautilus is flat out ugly and impractical. This minimalist approach is one resolution, but I’m more excited about this other project to make it more easily customizable (skinnable?) Maybe different distributions and users will come up with better interfaces.
It’s not the implementation that is faulty, it’s the concept behind it: web-browser-style file managers will always feel clumsy and unpractical. They borrow an interface paradigm that was not designed to manage files, but to explore and navigate content: the difference might be subtle at first, but very much substantial in everyday use.
Nautilus in spatial mode is what drew me to Linux in the first place, after several years of His Majesty the Finder…
Long live spatial file managers! =)
So why not just apt-get install thunar, then set it in Gnome as the default file manager?
hell, while your at it, Dump the bloated Gnome and use XFCE.
Hell, XFCE is bloated, I use the console exclusively and let me tell you it screams on my Quad Core CPU with 4GB RAM! /sarcasm
I’d really loooove to see some hard numbers showing how GNOME is so bloated compared to XFCE.
I can’t comment on bloat of GNOME vs. Xfce. However, I run GNOME’s NetworkManager applet under KDE (the KDE one doesn’t work well for me) and I’m a bit confused why it loads gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor, some CD burning capability, etc. into my RAM.
I have enough RAM not to care a lot about those nm-applet dependencies. I’m just telling what I observe.
PS: Before anybody mentions it: WiCD doesn’t work for me either.
I’m about to release a new KDE4 knetworkmanager version. If you have any unreported issues preventing you using the applet other than
* not shipped with fedora (changing for F12)
* crashing Plasma (fixed)
please let me know.
Well, not connecting at all to any WLAN under openSUSE 11.1 + KDE Factory is my problem with it.
I’ll put a package in KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop later today, then see how you get on.
Works now. Thanks a lot.
What I would like is the option to run the KDE network manager in the systray. I use KDE with awesome so plasma applets are useless to me (nothing against plasma though, it’s just not for me).
This is about to come true in 2 ways:
1) The new design we came up with at the NM sprint last month makes the GUI part a lot simpler
I am developing a non-Plasma standalone tray applet which naturally appears in the system tray, as well as the Plasmoid.
2) The code for Plasmoids in the system tray has just been added to KDE trunk – so I have NM-kde4 and the battery plasmoid in the tray now – it will be part of KDE 4.4
I know Xfce only from Xubuntu and at least there it looks almost identical to Ubuntu/GNOME with the only difference being that the default theme is blue instead of brown.
Personally, I don’t understand the intention in developing two almost identical DEs when the main difference is a few different apps. It would be like Peter Penz developing his own Qt-based DE just because he didn’t like Konqueror. Instead Dolphin was initially a 3rd party KDE 3.x application.
Not to fuel a flame war, but this is typical of *ubuntu. Change something in a way that isn’t accepted upstream?
Within KDE (and talking to my Gnome counterparts, they confirm it’s happening to them too), we often get reports of bugs from *ubuntu that we cannot reproduce on any other system.
They mess with our translations (see spanish translation’s “File” menu) and then when users come to KDE for help, they can’t follow the generic instructions because that menu doesn’t exist on kubuntu…
They don’t synchronize changes with upstream, and often push software out too soon in a broken way.
Please folks, get them to play nice with upstream?
IIUC this is about upstream not wanting their change (and it is a big improvement IMO). Sometimes it’s better to push forward with what they think is best. If upstream disagrees, it’s okay; there is no time to convince everybody if you have a release to make.
They don’t want the change, because they are already developing something better.
If Canonical just had asked the Nautilus devs beforehand, the Canonical guy could’ve helped them out instead of developing a feature that will never make it into upstream GNOME.
Will it be ready for Ubuntu Karmic? If not, it’s too late anyway.
It doesn’t seem like making the patch was a lot of work. If it doesn’t make it into upstream gnome, so be it – it’s still something LTS users will be using for 3 years (which is arguably the more important thing).
I for one don’t care about “configurable” toolbars; if the default sucks, fix it.
That being said, pointing fingers is not helping anyone. Stuff is either fixed, or it’s not fixed, nevermind where the blame is.
Isn’t that the point of open source?
The “new interface” (it’s not gonna debut in GNOME, luckily) seems to be horrible with text labels enabled. And it still wastes lots of space in having a separate drop down menu for the back button instead of a combined one for back and forward.
The real solution is to allow customizing the menus on-the-fly, it’s the same the GNOME devs went with. Dunno why it took like fifteen years.
gnome 1.4 had this feature, it was pretty nice, then magically in gnome 2 basically nothing had a customizable toolbar or menu, thats about the time I started looking elsewhere for a GUI
I don’t quite get why “upstream” must have more decision power than Ubuntu. What happened to the open source paradigm where everyone can change things at will? “Upstream” is just another word for “bureaucracy” in Linux. I welcome the changes introduced by Ubuntu.
It’s not like I’m in love with Ubuntu, but I’m definitely hoping they become a “Linux monopoly”. I’m one of those who believe too many options at the base is the main illness in Linux and I’m ready to take Ubuntu as THE Linux platform.
Bad use of screen real estate is not just a Nautilus issue, it’s a Gnome issue as a whole. They seem to believe everyone has huge monitors, so they don’t need to do proper interface layout. They just throw insane amounts of white space around everything and think they’re ready to go.
I suggest an experiment: install Windows or OS X on your laptop and you’ll feel like its screen has suddenly and magically received more resolution from heaven.
And you are welcome to do so. Just like upstream is welcome to reject them for many reasons (the current one hinted at in the blog being code quality – the current solution being hackish and upstream would have to maintain that code, build on it etc).
The major problem with that is that if that happened it would also kill Linux – other major players actually contribute more to the ecosystem and if they are marginalised/killed off, who would be doing the heavy lifting for Ubuntu to ride the wave off?
In design, whit space is very important. Besides, you are free to change your theme to something more minimal, or in settings for many programs choose to not show both text and icons. There are many ways to save screen real estate that people have the option to use, however personally I do agree with the gnome defaults, so that may make me biased.
(besides, if your opinion was the majority developer opinion, the defaults would have been changed by now.)
Not all PC’s are laptops. I like to have a large monitor and its screen estate to be well used thank you very much.
That they consider the sidebar to effectively be chrome – mind you in the ‘places’ format it’s next to useless, but switch it to ‘tree’ and it almost makes nautilus useful.
But then, I’ve always loved the Tree paradigm for displaying a filesystem. First thing I do in any OS that lets me is default the sidebar to tree, make DAMNED certain the address bar/location bar/whatever you want to call it this week is set to show the TEXT location, and for **** sake turn off the giant ******* icons in file view and show me a damned detail list with date and filesize!
You want to talk about waste of screen space, the chrome around the files isn’t it, those stupid eye-candy bullshit file icons that don’t tell you anything apart from the filename is the damned waste.
Though it could be worse, could be that stupid spatial navigation nonsense – nothing like ending up with 20 windows open on the desktop just trying to get to one directory. It’s why I consider the oldschool mac filesystem UI next to useless – The new ‘column’ style finally fixing one of the OS’ greatest shortcomings.
Maybe I spent too much time using XTree as a kid (Nortons Commander was for schmucks), but way too often I end up on machines screaming “Oh for **** sake, just show me a damned filesystem tree!”
Am I the only one who automatically switches to list/detail view, and for whom the icon view just pisses them off?
No sometimes I do switch to the detail view as well.
EXCELLENT and GLORIOUS!!!
Couldn’t have put any better…
While the GNOME community and Nautilus developers prefer their stagnant way of improving the GNOME desktop, someone actually wrote a paper that explained why this needed change.
I think users already noticed that YEARS AGO… It’s just that no one was really a developer. Or occupied any position inside the GNOME project.
I think this can be an anwser to those who said: “Go use frigging pcfman or frigging xfe… we *LOVE* the way Nautilus is…”[/i]
Go, go BUNTUS!
Edited 2009-07-21 19:59 UTC
I reserve judgement on this. I kind of like how it works/looks now, and judging by the screenshots, there’s no button to enable TEXT mode in the location bar, and the quick switch/button for VIEW MODE seems lacking. I use those pretty often…
I hope one can revert to the “old” nautilus setup. Say with a gconf key or something?
I would rather they put the sidebar, and the “main view” in “separate” boxes, with some padding and light borders, such as in thunar. Looks much better IMHO.
Hey guys… you know you can customize Nautilus, right?
Press F9 to remove the side panel, and you suddenly get a lot better chrome vs. data ratio.
Of course you lose access to “Places” but I prefer that over losing my menues.
The layout coming from the fixes can almost be obtained in the existing Nautilus. Just remove the main menu. It doesn’t work nearly as well, but then the culprit is really the silly side panel.
1)This is very much a matter of personal preference. Some people like all the buttons and have huge screens, some people don’t.
2)The upstream developers are already updating the toolbar so you can customize it to look like whatever you want (including these mockups)
3)Everyone will be able to have it just they way they want.
One side point, toolbars in gnome in general don’t have customizability and that is really weak. Apps that do have it did a lot of custom work to get it. Gnome should make it easy and default for *all* apps to have fully customizable toolbars (like qt4 and the entire rest of the world). I love gnome but the idea that nautilus developers have to hack in a new toolbar with this functionality is crazy.
One other side point, Dolphin is the #1 reason I never really gave KDE4 a chance. What a f-ing cluttered mess!!
Edited 2009-07-21 21:27 UTC
Stop trolling. Dolphin is freely configurable. Which defaults are shipped is the responsibility of the distributor.
The “spatial” mode of nautilus (which is the default behavior, but Ubuntu patched it to use the browser mode by default instead) had solved these problems years ago.
If you don’t “get” why spatial nautilus is great, I would recommend this article from a few years back:
http://www.osnews.com/story/7548/How_to_Deal_with_the_Spatial_Parad…
And perhaps http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2003/04/finder.ars for more background knowledge.
No, thank you. I don’t like spatial and I don’t need to be told that I’m wrong in my personal preference.
I am not telling anyone that they are wrong with their preference. I’m saying that as an informative comment for those who don’t understand what all the fuss is about and actively want to learn about the design choices behind it.
It was not meant to be condescending in any way towards anyone. I’m not saying that those who don’t like spatial nautilus are idiots.
I personally alternate between the two modes on a regular basis.
If you don’t “get” why spatial nautilus is great
No matter how great it is for some people it still will not suit everyone. Atleast I deeply hate the spatial mode, it’s annoying to use and I very much prefer the browser mode. As such, any improvements to the browser mode will benefit me and anyone else who doesn’t like spatial mode.
OR:
No matter how great it is for some people it still will not suit everyone. Atleast I deeply hate the browser mode, it’s annoying to use and I very much prefer the spatial mode. As such, any improvements to the spatial mode will benefit me and anyone else who doesn’t like browser mode.
***
So, it’s a matter of personal preferences, and as such continuing a debate over this seems pointless.
But, responding to another post, stating that “navigating through a vast and complex FS with lots and lots of files and folders in spatial is a huge pain in the neck”, I’d like to point out that in System 7/8 (OS 9, whatever) you had a System Folder with maybe 200 files in it, and only bad apps installed crap in the Extensions Folder.
That is to say, it is not necessary to have an OS that scatters minuscule files in 3418 different locations, and apps that do the same–forcing an unnecessary UI development such as the Browser mode: if your OS runs on 100 or 200 files, and your apps install as one APP or .exe or whatever, spatial mode starts to make more sense.
Browser mode is a good way (which I don’t personally like) to overcome a problem that lays above: incoherent and senseless proliferation of huge amounts of files, both at the OS and the application level. In this Linux (BSD, all *NIX) sucks…
Solve that problem and nobody would need browser mode, because the original Object-GUI paradigm of Desktop/Files/Folders would make sense again…
pooo:
2)The upstream developers are already updating the toolbar so you can customize it to look like whatever you want (including these mockups)
Now, that is great news, hope they get that done and fast!
Discussions of Nautilus seem to always end in a “Spatial vs. Browsing” mud-slinging flamefest. *throws compacted mud-curve-ball into crowd*
Never got what’s so great about spatial mode. I tried it on several occasions for varying lengths of times, but ultimately always switched back to browsing mode.
Now, my guess is, people that are prefer spatial have very shallow hierarchies and almost never go huntin’ through several levels of hierarchy to find one or some folders/files, or some such (ie. browsing.)
In such a case, where a certain folder/file is the target (and all you really care about!), spatial fails hard, because by then there’d be a bazillion junk spatial windows. (I know there is “double middle click”, good joke btw.)
deathshadow:
But then, I’ve always loved the Tree paradigm for displaying a filesystem. First thing I do in any OS that lets me is default the sidebar to tree, make DAMNED certain the address bar/location bar/whatever you want to call it this week is set to show the TEXT location, and for **** sake turn off the giant ******* icons in file view and show me a damned detail list with date and filesize!
Could not agree more!
I finally got sick of waiting for Nautilus to condescend to open my home directory, and went to Fluxbox and Thunar. What a relief. No more negotiating all those menus to configure anything, instant opening of folders, edit your own menu without a wizard….
Try it, you’ll find you do not need any human interface guideline influenced crud at all. If they ever mess up thunar, there is always xfe or pcmanfm.
Less is more.
I couldn’t agree more. I’m a huge XFCE fan and don’t see the need for KDE and GNOME (just IMO – choice is a good thing, too).
If they want to save screen space, why not use a global menu bar a la MacOS. It not only save screen space it is also faster to work with (Fitts law).
Right now we have window managers, display managers, session managers in our X11 environments why not add another component a called the menu manager, that applications could ask to present their menus when they are in focus. If the protocol was standardized all applications and toolkits could be made to support it, not just Gnome.
One such menu manager could implement a global menu bar. Separating the menu presentation feature from the applications would also give good opportunities for scripting, and accessability solutions.
Another thing they could do to save screen space could be to hide folders (like hidden files) that is not commonly used by non developers and non sysadmins.
They could also hide the Desktop folder when displaying your home direktory, it doesnt make sense to normal users not familliar with Unix file system hierachi to have their desk locked into their file cabinet.
At the / level, /media /home could be displayed by default, the rest could be displayed as hidden files.
To save even more space and make the interface more navigation friendly, there could be an option to hide folders that you are not allowed to open or drop things into.
With thes changes we would not only get more space for the things we use often, we would also get a less scary environment for the new Linux user.
How for the love of God do you get Nautilus to work properly when it’s installed without Gnome?
I’m using Ubuntu Alternate 9.04 with WindowMaker, I’ve installed nautilus for the purpose of browsing SMB/windows shares but when I click on nautilus’ network icon I get the message “Nautilus cannot handle “network” locations.”.
I believe that I’m probably missing a package but whatever package I’m missing wasn’t a dependency of nautilus.
If I install KDE’s “dolphin”, that can browse network shares. I don’t like dolphin, I’d rather have nautilus work as it does in a default Ubuntu install.
Have you tried starting it from the command line and seeing if any missing package messages show up?
it seems to “need” gdm.
doesn’t need gdm, it seems to need the window manager to be launched by dbus-launch, ie
dbus-launch –exit-with-session wmaker
(which is what I now have in my .xinitrc)