Files (aka Nautilus) received major changes in Gnome 3.6. While overall its re-fresh look is getting good critics, there are some discussions about the drop of features like Compact View and Extra Pane.

Jon McCann explains in 7 points in his blog the goals of Files 3.6.

None the less the new Files feels much more modern and pretty, but this is just optics. “Inside” is even better. A quick tour on changes proves it!

Files 3.6 Roadmap

Already done!

To be done!

Nice to have!

Visit Files Roadmap

Files 3.6 Goals | by McCann

Jon McCann explains in depth all the new features in Files 3.6.

1. Be Immediately Useful

Files has gained a “Recently” modified view. You aren’t required to navigate in Folders to find your recently files any more!

2. Have a Functional Search

This is the biggest improvement in Files 3.6! Searching in Files was completely broken and you had to use a terminal to search for you Files. One of the major bugs in Gnome is considered closed :)

3. Have Simpler and More Natural Workflows

This obviously is the whole point of Gnome 3, and Nautilus gained a super new feature. Select some files and immediately create a new folder inside the selection, and move your files there!

4. Be More Coherent

Some work is in progress to make the whole Gnome3+Files look more consistence. For example the re-designed Dialog Windows that are coming soon!

5. Be more Effective

This is a a goal how to make the Files features more clear and comprehensive, like the Tree View. McCann says: “We’ve heard the complaints loud and clear. They’ve been ringing out on the mailing lists and piling up in bugzilla“, which even if you do not believe it is totally true. There is an active response to everyone complains in Nautilus bugzilla and Nautilus mailing lists.

6. Be more Beatiful

Simple and beautiful, but yet powerful. If you can’t achieve the third(powerful) isn’t big deal. Simplicity and look are more important. In my opinion, they did great in this area.

7. Trading Spaces

The last goal is the one that got the most complains. This simply goes, if you want to change the workflow (Have simpler and more natural workflows) you need to remove some of the features that are opposite with this change. Obviously we are talking about the removal of Extra Pane and Compact view.

McCann explains these two decisions.

Why Extra Pane removed?

This was removed for a couple of reasons. The first reason was that it was undiscoverable. Not all undiscoverable interfaces are bad but this one also stood in the way of providing a better alternative. Even if you never used the Extra Pane you always had useless Move To and Copy To items in the menus.

We wanted to create a better Move and Copy workflow and really these items had to go. Once you remove all user facing ways to use the feature you have to ask yourself (as a good maintainer) whether the trade is worth it. Should we keep the feature for which we have a new and better alternative in Nautilus, a very similar and easily enhanced feature available in the Shell side by side view, and a pile of bugs getting no attention in bugzilla? We decided it was better for the project to remove it. This hasn’t pleased everyone but remember we still have some ways to go to make the experience complete.

Why Compact View removed?

This is a tricky one. A lot of reasons people have been using this view are due to the other two views sucking for various reasons. We want to fix the root problems. We intend to have more effective list views for identifying files by name, more effective grid or icon views for finding files by content, and more effective search for finding anything based on name, textual content, or metadata regardless of where it is. This is consistent with the other core GNOME 3 applications. Working around the default isn’t going to do it.

The role for compact view is unclear. Our research suggests that it is something like: the only view that works for browsing a lot of files at once. This is really hard to reconcile with providing good defaults that just work and having consistency with the file chooser.

The view itself was not without problems and we would rather focus on making icon and list rock. I won’t dwell on the reasons here since they have been discussed at length already.





Read the full McCann’s post

We’ll make a full review of Nautilus in the next days with all these new exciting features, but there is no doubt that new Files rocks!