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I like Nautilus, the Gnome file manager. Having said this, I’m trying to not refer to it as “Nautilus“; I’d like the fact that it’s an application to disappear. Like the Mac, I’d like it to just be that my desktop shows folders. Not “my desktop starts Nautilus to show the contents of a folder“. The Nautilus window is the folder. It’s all spatial, see?
Anyway, a gripe and a wish about this non-existent application.
The gripe is: Ctrl+T is bound to “Send to Trash“. This is an unbelieveably shit idea, because Ctrl+T is “New Tab” in Firefox. So, if you hit Ctrl-T when you think that your Firefox window is focused, but instead a folder has the focus, then whatever is selected gets deleted. This is the World’s Worst Idea. One of the things you’re supposed to do when implementing new stuff is look at the failure modes; what if it goes wrong? Now, this is, of course, not the Nautilus people’s fault, and neither is it the Firefox people’s fault. It’s just unfortunate. What is not unfortunate, though, is that there is no way to change that Nautilus keybinding. I’m not asking for keys to be arbitrarily rebindable: this is not KDE we’re talking about. But I can’t make it go away, and today I deleted two folders by mistake because of it. Fortunately, I could fish them back out of the Trash. Unfortunately, the Trash is crap; the Windows Recycle Bin is a lot, lot better, because things in the Recycle Bin know where they came from and can be put back there with a mouse click. The Trash is just another folder somewhere, as far as I can tell. And if you delete something by mistake, because it was highlighted, you don’t know what it was that you deleted. It’s only because I know the folder that was showing well that I could pull out of my head what the thing I’d deleted was. This is bad, and I do not know how to fix it.
Update: it seems to be removed in later versions of Nautilus. It went away in version 1.647.4.3, as can be seen from the diff (search for “accelerator =” to find the line that disappears), even though, rather bizarrely, the changelog doesn’t really say anything about it. Anyway, looks like it’ll be gone in 2.10, which I’ll get when hoary gets stable.
The wish is: can we have TortoiseSVN for Gnome, please please please? It’d be really handy. The “nautilus-python”: bindings should make it pretty easy to handle this—Nautius already supports WebDAV, after all—but they seem to be pretty new and untried and (more importantly) not packaged for Ubuntu, more’s the pity. People are using them for cool stuff like displaying Creative Commons licences that apply to particular files and I want some of that customise-my-folders action. Especially if I can make folders know that they are Subversion working copies.