We’re all used to hearing about features GNOME has retired, moved, or outright dropped from Nautilus (aka ‘Files’), the GNOME file manager.

Pop a cushion on the floor to break your jaw crashing from the following news: for the release of GNOME 3.22 later this year GNOME has actually added a new feature!

I’m being a little facetious, of course. But news of this feature will please the power users among you who’ve been a little put off by the application’s recent …streamlining.

The (wonderful) World of GNOME built the latest ‘batch rename’ branch from GNOME Git, and shares this video of batch renaming in Nautilus 3.22:

The feature works intuitively: you select multiple files, right-click and select ‘rename’ (you can also hit F2) to open the batch rename dialog. From this dialog you can choose to add text to the names (either append or prepend); replace words in the current filenames; or format file names.

Do keep in mind that everything you see demoed above is still work-in-progress. The workflow presented above is still subject to change, refinement, fixing.

What other file manager features would you like to see added to Nautilus?