bobpeers -> blog

One minor irritation I have with Nautilus is that the file or folder listing uses the full width of the display. The problem with this is that when you right click on a file or folder you get a different menu than if you right click on an empty part of the display. In this menu you cannot create files or folders.

So if you want to create a new file or folder using the right click context menu you have to use the empty area below the listing.

The problem arises when the listing is longer then the display, in which case there is no free space and so you cannot right click to create new files or folders.

I actually like the Windows Explorer way of doing this where you have to click on the item to get the context menu for the item, otherwise clicking in the row produces the generic context menu.

One feature that I really like in Gnome 2.22 is the new file operation dialog used when moving or copying files in Nautilus.

If you select multiple files at once to copy you just get a single progress bar showing the progress as a whole of all the files.
However if you start a copy/move and then start subsequent copy/moves instead of opening their own dialogs they are just added to the already open progress dialog as shown here:

This gives much more information plus it really stops screen clutter by keeping all the information in one place.

The only slight niggle I have is that as the amount copied is updated twice per second it makes the whole line of text jump left and right as the numbers change width. It would be much nicer if the amount copied had it’s own label so it didn’t affect the rest of the text.