Getting the Most from Marlin File Browser; Plus See What’s New

By , Published December 8, 2011

Marlin is a sleek, fast and sexy Nautilus alternative.

Just over a week ago we told you How to Install ‘Marlin’ File Browser in Ubuntu 11.10. Since then Marlin has been updated with a handful of additional changes – some which might tempt the more reluctant into giving it a try.

Changes include:

  • Marlin now has ability to compress files
  • Marlin doesn’t depend on contractor anymore, but on extended-actions
  • Open Terminal extension now works

Compress has been long awaited function and now when implemented you can compress file easily via the right click dropdown menu:

After clicking on Compress you will see the good old dialog for compressing folders:


The replacement of contractor with extended-actions adds some positives:

  • There is no need to download and install extra software to make Marlin do basic functions
  • The extensions comes enabled out of the box, so no need to enable it manually

The Open Terminal extension is useful so it’s good to see it (finally) working:

Extra features

Aside from the changes mentioned above there are several other Marlin features that you may or may not know about:
  • Modal dialogs for properties windows
  • Ability to use file previewer
  • Ability to rearrange items on the toolbar

Modal dialogs for properties windows are Gnome-Shell specific and can be enabled via Preferences -> Behaviour:


After enabled they your properties windows will look like this:

File previewers are nifty apps that allow you to preview files without opening them. The most well known of which is Gloobus Preview. (32bit .deb | 64bit .deb)

If you want to use a file-previewer in Marlin you will have to open dconf-editor and navigate to apps -> marlin -> preferences and set previewer-path to /usr/bin/gloobus-preview (or /usr/bin/sushi if you prefer to use it):

Then, to use it, just select a file or folder and press the space key:

While I personally found Marlin’s arrangement of toolbar items perfect you can easily tailor the toolbar items to suit your tastes by right-clicking on the toolbar and choosing ‘Customize Toolbar’.

Related posts:

  1. [How to] Install ‘Marlin’ File Browser in Ubuntu 11.10
  2. Nautilus-Elementary is dead, long live ‘Marlin’
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  • http://twitter.com/marcusklaas MarcusKlaasDeVries

    I have seen much software in my days. Good, bad, but never such software like Marlin. How does it compare to Nautilus? Hard to put into words.

    • Anonymous

      I have installed it, but cant find big differences. i have not used it that much, though

    • http://twitter.com/rub3nmv Ruben Martinez Vilar

      Well… I’ve seen Dolphin, which is much better I think.

      • Anonymous

        Now Dolphin is cool… I am glad someone can see beauty here.

    • http://twitter.com/jonathanmoerman Jonathan Moerman

      It’s faster… and slicker.

    • http://profiles.google.com/lain.halfbit Lain inVerse

       Faster, beautiful but buggy.

      For instance make compressed file and extract it right in the same place. Crash!

  • Eric Oldenburg

    How about dual panes by default? That is my biggest issue with Nautilus.

  • http://twitter.com/Lucas_SM Lucas Silveira

    Simply, the BEST!

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_ZWOIIEEVXJ7FMNPUI4453BKDPQ Mark

    Dual pane mode, something that works more like Total Commander, would be a killer feature here.

  • http://anubeon.tumblr.com Lee Hyde

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t extended-actions fall into the category of ‘extra software’ equally as well as contractor does. Is extended-actions passive/file based or does it run in the background as a daemon (much as I assume contractor does).

    Has there been some sort of major falling out between ammonkey and the other elementary developers? I know that he left the elementary council/team some weeks ago, and both extended-actions and varka appear to be forks of, or otherwise parallel to, existing elementary projects (contractor and granite respectively). It would be a shame if there was a rift forming between them, ammonkey is doing some fantastic work and an unnecessary division of labour (if that is what this represents) would seem counter productive for all concerned. :-(

    • Anonymous

      For whatever reason, neither party seems to want to go deeper on the reasons behind the breakup. It’s their right I guess.

      As long as Ammonkey keeps making Marlin better, I personally couldn’t care less. I’m not a big fan of Elementary, so having Marlin out of it is good news for those like me.

      • http://anubeon.tumblr.com Lee Hyde

        That’s the impression I got as well. It would be a crying shame if whatever rift has formed was so acrimonious as to be counter productive. Their right to keep things under wraps though, as you say. It’s all very curious though. ;-)

        It would be nice to know whether varka and extended-actions represent a complete break with elementary and in particular some of their back-end work (like contractor and granite). I suppose such would give ammonkey et.al. more flexibility (design/development by committee being a slow process), but it does seem a shame (whatever your feelings may be towards elementary as a whole) to duplicate labourious work which could well be maintained jointly. Of course all of that’s assuming that varka and extended-actions are what I think they are.

        Anyway, this is entering into the realm of gossip now (entirely my own fault) so I’ll shut up now. :-)

        • http://elementaryos.org Fabian Thoma

          Well in fact I just looked at the code of extended-actions it’s almost exactly the same thing as our newest version of contractor(that ammonkey wrote). The only difference I spotted is that it uses a different directory to load the information from, which doesn’t make sense to me at all.
          Also varka seems to include the widgets from Granite that ammonkey likes or uses, so again it’s just a duplication IMHO.

          We don’t know yet what we’ll do about it, but we will discuss this at our next developer meeting.

          • http://anubeon.tumblr.com Lee Hyde

            Presumably, if ammonkey chooses to fork contractor and granite there’s not a lot that can be done. Beyond an approach to him to avoid an unnecessary form if possible.

            Of course, I have no idea what the situation vis. elementary and ammonkey is, but sufficed to say, I do hope this whole affair can be sorted out to mutual benefit/agreement in due course. I have nothing but respect for both ammonkey and the broad elementary developer community as a whole and would hate to acrimony slowing their progress or undermining their respective works.

          • http://twitter.com/lallenlowe Allen Lowe

            one solution is for us to switch to extended-actions as a downstream, thus ending the duplication. As far as varka goes, it seems that some duplication is inevitable.

        • http://elonoir.hyves.nl Jan Hopmans

          There is some vague info about this, and ammonkey, in these logs: http://elementaryos.org/sites/default/files/user/32/elementary-Developer-Forum-1.txt

          They’re from the first developer forum meeting. I don’t know enough, but some people who know more might be able to fit the pieces together.

  • dennishojgaard

    Do you have a link for that icon theme?

    • http://alaukik.myopenid.com/ Alaukik

      It is oxygen-icon-theme which you can install from the software center.

      • Georgi Karavasilev

        Not exactly. It’s oxygen, but this is my Oxygen port for Ubuntu (which is still WiP), it is tweaked version of Oxygen that is to fit Ubuntu. When it’s done, I’ll give you a ring-ring :P (By ring-ring, I meant article :D)

        • David Bobb

          Very nice. If you could outdo Oxymentary that would be good. I created it out of convenience for myself but I haven’t bothered to get Unity/Gnome3 to see how well they hold up in those DE’s. Do try to add the special folder icons as well (ie: Music, Videos, etc)

          • Georgi Karavasilev

            I would like to use Oxymentary as a base, however the links in Gnome-Look are broken :(

        • Akshat Jain

          I caught the reference

          • Georgi Karavasilev

            And they say I’m obsessed wiv … well you-know-what :D

  • http://2buntu.com Roland Taylor

    I respect ammonkeyd, but the forking and pointless “RARARA” is getting overbearing now. Time to cut it out and learn to work around people’s differences.

    I know the elementary team may have said somethings he didn’t like, but this is just silly.

    • http://twitter.com/mickstep Michael Stephenson

      I don’t see why Marlin should come under the elementary umbrella, it doesn’t have a cog menu it has a standard menu, and could be a real contender for gnome inclusion. Maybe ammonkey should move over to the gnome infrastructure and benefit from all they have to provide, such as dedicated translators.

      • Daniel Foré

        Marlin actually does make use of the compact AppMenu and you can see it in all of the screenshots above. It’s just the icon themes in those screenshots don’t use the same icon.

        • http://twitter.com/mickstep Michael Stephenson

          I stand corrected, I didn’t notice that when I installed it, as it has the standard menu too, and yeah it’s not a cog in my icon theme.
          Still think it could get wider usage if ammonkey Marlin aligned itself with gnome though.

          • Daniel Foré

            I’m not sure how likely that is to happen. When ammonkey and I first started working with Nautilus we tried to upstream our changes, but there was a conflict between our design vision and upstream’s design vision.

          • http://anubeon.tumblr.com Lee Hyde

            Would Gnome be happy hosting Marlin alongside Nautilus under its banner? I ask only because I’m not particularly familiar with how Gnome is governed. Can they support two concurrent yet ostensibly competing projects?

          • http://twitter.com/mickstep Michael Stephenson

            No idea really, but getting hosted by gnome is a far cry from being included in gnome.
            I’d imagine it helps though.
            They certainly host many competing products at gnome.org though.
            Banshee and Rhythmbox for example.

          • http://2buntu.com Roland Taylor

             They can, but they are unlikely to do so now. It was common at one time, for example there was more than one contender for a presentation app in GNOME Office – though all contenders are dead.

            Essentially GNOME works like this:

            - If we make it, it’s great and it stays.
            - If someone else makes it, we might grit our teeth and use it :S.
            - If someone else makes it and it’s totally amazing, then we’ll make something that looks just like it and claim ours is better (cough sushi cough).

          • http://2buntu.com Roland Taylor

             That’s “himself”, and no. I don’t think aligning with GNOME is the solution at all. GNOME is great, a great foundation, a great project, but it’s not a good fit for everyone.

          • http://twitter.com/mickstep Michael Stephenson

            Sorry I originally wrote ammonkey, then decided to change it to marlin, then forgot to delete ammonkey.

          • http://2buntu.com Roland Taylor

             @mickstep:disqus no problem :)

      • http://anubeon.tumblr.com Lee Hyde

        My installation of Marlin (from the marlin-dev’s daily PPA) most certainly does have a AppMenu (or ‘cog menu’ as you put it) not that, that should force any developer to place their work under the elementary umbrella. The AppMenu only appears if the menu bar is hidden (e.g. using F8).

        My understanding is that Marlin (much like nautilus-elementary) is, in the words of @cassidyjames:disqus , is the property of it’s lead developer, ammonkey. It was only every considered under the elementary umbrella because of ammonkey‘s (now former) affiliation with the elementary project. Ammonkey didn’t seem as keen to distance Marlin from elementary whilst he was so affiliated (hence the potential confusion).

  • Dirk Waldeck

    more like KDE, i approve of this

  • Grim Imir

    I can’t get gnome sushi to work in Marlin, even after following the instructions.

    • Georgi Karavasilev

      Try using:
      /usr/bin/sushi
      instead of: 
      /usr/bin/gnome-sushi

      • http://twitter.com/mickstep Michael Stephenson

        gsettings set org.gnome.marlin.preferences previewer-path “/usr/bin/sushi” 
        For those who can’t be bothered to install or load up dconf-editor

        • Georgi Karavasilev

          More nerdy :P I like it :)

          • Pranav Karanjkar

            I also can’t get sushi or gloobus-preview to work after following the instructions..

          • Luis Collymoore

            I did by doing this: gsettings set org.gnome.marlin.preferences previewer-path “/usr/bin/gloobus-preview “

          • Pranav Karanjkar

            @google-7cd56d0bf9bd4a692c363d7fd4cf5f4f:disqus Thanks, it works  now.

  • Satchit Bhogle

    What would a person looking to switch from Nautilus to Marlin full time lose from the switch?

    • Georgi Karavasilev

      Not-so-good Nautilus 3 UI? :D
      Now, seriously:
      1) Marlin can’t draw the desktop … just yet)
      2) One can’t middle click on marlin bradcrums to open a folder in new tab
      That are mine issues :P

      • Satchit Bhogle

        Sounds good to me. am monkeyd said that Marlin should be able to draw the desktop soon. How do I set Marlin as the default file browser? Should I risk bunging Nautilus? Sadly, there’s nothing more stable than a daily build

        • Georgi Karavasilev

          Marlin -> Edit -> Preferences -> Behaviour and there click on the magical “make Marlin my default file manager” button :P Easy-peasy 

        • http://anubeon.tumblr.com Lee Hyde

          What would be beyond fantastic is if Marlin could drew desktop icons on a per workspace basis (I suppose they’d be called workspace icons in that case) without resorting to drawing the entire desktop (i.e. the background/wallpaper). It really isn’t a file managers place to draw the desktop background, and forgoing that feature would make Marlin (with desktop icons) compatible with Compiz’s wallpaper plug-in.

      • Satchit Bhogle

        Ooh, lots of issues. Can’t move across lines with left and right, barely legible text when selected, inexplicable Bookmarks label text failure, etc. Still, looking quite good.

        How do I make Nautilus default again? :S

        • http://2buntu.com Roland Taylor

           :)… AskUbuntu.com

  • http://profiles.google.com/lain.halfbit Lain inVerse

    Dual Panels mode… well, it’s already like erotic dream. :)
    But you know what? The last thing which I would like to see in Marlin is dual-panel mode. Why? Well, that’s simple. Dual panel mode is not really useful without *Whatever* Commander hotkeys like F5/F6 for copy/move and Tab to jump between panels, and Alt+F1/F2 (F3 instead F2?) to chose from locations list. And Insert key to mark files, …and many other keys and combinations. These keys not used or used for different purpose in usual mode and it will be a problem to support them.

    Nautilus have dual panel mode but without all hotkeys it’s barely useful. I can open one more Nautilus, put it to the right and will have almost the same thing as Nautilus with 2 panels. It just doesn’t matter. Actually switching between two instances even easier then switching between two panels.

    • http://twitter.com/Emacs232 Denis Cheremisov

      Yes. I was all over the dual panel mode but quickly realized how useless it is after it appeared in Nautilus.

  • Gyan Lakhwani

    Looks great. Bye-bye, nautilus. :D

  • http://twitter.com/lallenlowe Allen Lowe

    Great work and congrats to ammonkey! At elementary we love all the beautiful and well designed software in the FLOSS community, no matter who is developing it!

    • Freddi

      Why is the location bar beautiful only on Elementary OS, but not cross-theme? I would love if it would visually integrate better into Ambiance.

      • http://anubeon.tumblr.com Lee Hyde

        I’m not certain, but I think that’s an issue with the respective theme (e.g. ambiance, radiance, etc…) rather than marlin. The elementary theme is obviously tailor made for marlin’s (and nautilus-elementary before it) take on the pathbar. Might be worth filing a bug against the themes in question if that’s the case. :-)

      • https://launchpad.net/~shnatsel Shnatsel

        Hmm, it worked fine in Ambiance a while ago for me.

  • http://twitter.com/di0nysys Andrew Smith

    marlin is where it is at!

    • Anonymous

      I like to be where no one is… I find this File Browser ugly and to KDE looking.

      • http://anubeon.tumblr.com Lee Hyde

        I you basing that on this screenshot only? Because you may have been thrown by the fact that the OP has applied an oxygen-derived icon them (oxygen being the defauly KDE icon theme if memory serves). I don’t see much in Marlin with eGTK or Ambiance/Radiance applied that could be said to be ‘KDE looking’ to be honest.

  • Anonymous

    On/Off buttons look nice at first. Until someone tries to translate it. In most languages apart from English you can’t really fit the words “On” and “Off” on such small space. In Polish it’s “Włączone” i “Wyłączone” (not only long but also hard to distinguish at first glance). Color coded or tick and x would better.

    • http://anubeon.tumblr.com Lee Hyde

      I though that the on/off buttons already were colour coded (theme dependent of course). A colour (with egtk it’s bright blue and quite clear) is applied when in the on state, and not when in the off state.

      Are there no established short-hands for on and off in polish? If not, that is a bit of a puzzler; how could polish (and other languages) be accommodated without botching elegant design. :-?

    • Daniel Foré

      Well, depending on your theme, it should already be clearly color coded. But maybe Polish translators can work around this. I’m not sure if it’s possible to display “✓” in GTK or not. But that’s definitely an interesting idea. Another would be to put “1″ and “0″ or some such thing.

      • Anonymous

        In gnome-shell it does this, for English it’s ON/OFF, else wise it does I/O

    • https://launchpad.net/~shnatsel Shnatsel

      “Вкл”/”Выкл” abbreviations are pretty common in Russian; I wonder if you can come up with something similar in Polish (the languages are similar)

      • https://launchpad.net/~exeleration-g Exeleration-G

        Yeah, why not something like Włą/Wyłą?

        • Jan pol

          Why not just use ON/OFF for every language? (native spanish speaker here)

  • Anonymous

    In case someone didn’t already say it, but there is an ABBA video playing in the last screenshot

  • http://profiles.google.com/mrmcq2u John McHugh

    Yeah but your post on the Elementary OS site was described as being elementary propaganda by ammonkey on his google plus page – plus.google.com/104430571282202216208/posts

    • mxyzptlk

      Okay — didn’t know that. 

      *bows out*

  • Anonymous

    i miss nautilus’s ctrl+f and ctrl+s features

  • https://launchpad.net/~mpt mpt

    Why would a user want a Properties window to be modal? Why is that even an option?

    • http://twitter.com/lallenlowe Allen Lowe

      good question mpt, I wish that option hadn’t been added to the prefs. :(

    • Daniel Foré

      https://bugs.launchpad.net/marlin/+bug/901958
      Would appreciate you marking as affecting you ;)

    • http://2buntu.com Roland Taylor

      Because some people like it…

      Not sure why… but they do. It’s best we don’t have another scenario where people can scream bloody murder over losing options :).

      • Daniel Foré

        I really pray our standard of design hasn’t simply become popular opinion o.O

        • http://2buntu.com Roland Taylor

           lol no :D…

          it has become “my way or the highway” :D

          • Daniel Foré

            Or rather “Do what makes logical sense”

  • http://chrisbauer.org Chris Bauer

    Whenever I try to update I get: “The action would require the installation of packages from not authenticated sources”

  • http://profiles.google.com/rahul.pache Rahul Pasad

    Just one question.
    How did you make your desktop look like that? Its awesome.

  • sarin cv

    It doesn’t display drive information on right click – > properties. It says 12.0 KB Folder instead.

  • http://artem-karimov-93.ya.ru/ Artem Karimov

    PLEASE, never post screenshots of modified Ubuntu desktop. Changed wallpaper at most.

    We should try to aim at simple Ubuntu users, not modders.

    • Zombifier

      What’s wrong with it anyway? IMO Linux is all about customization, so that image is a good example.

      • http://artem-karimov-93.ya.ru/ Artem Karimov

        Gentoo is all about customisation. Simplicity is much more important for Ubuntu users.

        • Satchit Bhogle

          Gentoo is all about frustration, not customisation.

          • http://artem-karimov-93.ya.ru/ Artem Karimov

            Depends on hardware, user’s proficiency and patience. Gentoo may even be quite worthwile for some. Although sure is a tinkering toy for the most.

    • http://profiles.google.com/frodowiz frodo wiz

      @artem.. yeah cuz no one who uses ubuntu has done any modding..  can you insert foot now artem?

  • http://twitter.com/Emacs232 Denis Cheremisov

    OMG
    What IDIOT uses these ON/OFF widgets instead of checkboxes?

    • Daniel Foré

      Checkboxes and Switches mean different things.

      Checkboxes are used when you want to include something in a list or otherwise make a selection. (such as showing an optional UI element)

      Switches are used when you want to enable or disable something. (such as running a background service)

      • http://twitter.com/Emacs232 Denis Cheremisov

        It’s very hard to think out more artificial explanation. It’s a pure bullsh1t. They always used checkboxes before, and recently trained monkeys from Gnome Foundation decided these are different things. It’s hard to use and hard to read widget.

  • https://launchpad.net/~silverwave silverwave

    How do yo copy the bread crumb path as text?

  • http://olezhek.net Oleg

    Marlin looks quite similar to Dolphin.
    “Set colour” feature (seems like it was copied from OS X’s file browser) is very nice and useful.

  • https://launchpad.net/~serrano-pereira Serrano

    For some reason I can’t get the previewer working. I tried the method from the article (with dconf-editor) and I tried:
    sudo gsettings set org.gnome.marlin.preferences previewer-path “/usr/bin/gloobus-preview”
    But none worked. Any help?

    • Luis Collymoore

      Same here.

  • http://twitter.com/Dzyna Anton Dzyna

    How to disable button “make Marlin my  default File Manager”? Nautilus default File Manager.

  • http://twitter.com/Xlusively_Harry Harvinder Singh

    can anybody tell me what are those Icons called?? they are cool

    • Satchit Bhogle

      The icons are a port of Oxygen to Ubuntu. You can get it by contacting Georgi. The screenshot regarding modal dialogues, however, uses the Faenza icon set.

  • Pranav Karanjkar

    Doesn’t Marlin use the same thumbnails as nautilus?? In my Music folder, Marlin is determined not to create thumbnails for all folders except one. So, I tried deleting ~/.thumbnails folder but no effect on Marlin thumbnails. It did recreate nautilus thumbnails though…

 
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