Nautilus Quicklist Adds Bookmark Support for Precise

By , Published January 17, 2012

Nautilus Quicklist Adds Bookmarks

Support for accessing bookmarked folders through the Nautilus Quicklist in Ubuntu 12.04 has finally arrived.

The feature, one long overdue, lists user’s bookmarks – both custom and default – alongside a static entry for opening a new Nautilus window.

Which is all very handy.

As trivial seeming an addition as a bookmark list sounds, the developer behind it, Didier Roche, notes on his blog that it was not as straightforward to implement as one might expect.

Nautilus’ launcher item is enriched further by this addition, complimenting the ‘dynamic quicklist’ for file transfer/copy that debuted in Ubuntu 11.10.

Nautilus file transfer dynamic quicklist - as seen in Oneiric

Related posts:

  1. [How to] Add Actions, Emblem Support Back to Nautilus in Ubuntu 11.10
  2. Phew! Nautilus-Elementary revived in time for Ubuntu Natty
  3. Nautilus Elementary adds Toolbar Editor; fulfils bug opened in 2001
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  • AJ

    Unity is coming along nicely now. Waiting for this level of usability, hooray.

    • https://launchpad.net/~esteinma Erik

      Agreed. Although I’m not using Unity right now I get the impression that it is evolving in the right direction. I’ve used Unity for Natty and so much small things have been improved. I hope enough of these improvements will land in Precise to make it the best Ubuntu LTS ever.

    • http://twitter.com/BuddyThirteen J. Camaron Rogers

      Too bad they had to beta test on their own users before getting anything actually workable…

      • Anonymous

        it is a shame, but thank god were no longer beta testers for microsoft :)

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

       That is an improvement in Nautilus, not Unity. Unity has had support for this for quite a while. Any application can support this.

  • Anonymous

    It’s good idea … isn’t it

  • Satchit Bhogle

    1. Please tell me using the quicklist opens the location in a new tab instead of a new window.
    2. The file transfer quicklist
    a) Blocks the regular quicklist,
    b) Is not very useful; one of the major benefits of the progress bar is that it makes the copy dialogue obsolete; the only benefit I could see for displaying the copy dialogue is if they had hidden transfer dialogues by default, relying instead on quicklist progress bars (which may not be a bad thing).

    • Joel dos Santos Almeida

      I want all of that too, especialy the tab thing!

    • Conscious User

      I prefer opening in new windows, but I have to admit that new tabs are probably more expected since this is how browsers behave.

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_GE4EYP3QOQ246PLG2Y2DOD2NIQ Dr. Fly

      On point 1, it actually opens the location in your current window, current tab.

      • Satchit Bhogle

        That’s terrible. If you have your window in front of you, why would you change it via quicklist when you have the Places sidebar? It makes far more sense to have it in a new tab.

        • Anonymous

          It would make most sense to have it in a new window. I suppose that usually you want to move or copy something to the new location. And with tabs that is – just like the whole nautilus-tab implementation – difficult to achieve.

          • Satchit Bhogle

            I have argued on several occasions that copying between tabs is as easy if not easier than copying between windows. While separate windows of the same application can get lost in a flood of windows, tabs cannot be lost so easily. It is usually a shorter distance to drag between tabs, and Nautilus switches focus to the new tab when a dragged file is hovering over it, making it easy to drag and drop.

            To be honest, I, and most people I know, don’t perform transfers by dragging and dropping. We use cut-and-paste, and moving between tabs, whether using keyboard or mouse is infinitely easier than moving between windows.

          • Anonymous

            Maybe I would agree with you, if tabs in nautilus were generally easier to use. Firefox (for instance) shows the way. Always show tabs, and have a small ‘+’-icon somewhere to add a new tab.

            In its current implementation I’m probably just not enough used to the feature to find it the logical thing to do. Not even, if the new tab has been opened via quicklist.

            And to be honest, if I want to use the keyboard I usually use the terminal.

          • Anonymous

            agree with the multiple window problem, working with multiple windows is quite hard, specially with the launcher.

          • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

             You could always press F3 though.

          • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_FD5M7R6NP7VXXFS4FHYYAGCHPM James

            Whoa!

      • http://www.worldwidewhat.net Lars Jarlvik

        I think that’s fixed by now, it will open in a new window, see:
        https://bugs.launchpad.net/ayatana-design/+bug/723862

  • Sathish Kumar

    cannot access sub-folders from launcher  when nautilus window not opening. what a stupid behaviour..

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

      They are bookmarks. It’s not a replacement for Nautilus. Having a nested menu with thousands of entries would make it completely unusable.

  • http://twitter.com/JackWilkins0n Jack Wilkinson

    now why doesn’t osx lion do that…

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

      Because it’s not as awesome as Ubuntu :-)

  • Joel dos Santos Almeida

    Let’s hope that they will not take the functions before the launch for “stability problems” or whatever

    • Satchit Bhogle

      I’m in two minds. On one hand, quicklists are easy to create, and Nautilus quicklists (with auto-update for bookmarks) have existed since at least May 2011. On the other hand, Unity devs failed to include a quicklist for Nautilus in Oneiric for unknown reasons. My questions when they announced that the quicklist wouldn’t make Oneiric went unanswered.

      • Anonymous

        Mind you that wasn’t a real dynamic quicklist, as it was actually another software (a script) runing in the background updating the static quicklists in the .desktop file. (And for the changes to appear, the reload of the launcher was necessary.)

  • Anonymous

    Hmm, a divider between the default stuff and bookmarks would be good.

  • http://mohoho.de Kai Mast

    Nice, empathy is still missing quicklists though…

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_GE4EYP3QOQ246PLG2Y2DOD2NIQ Dr. Fly

    Clicking any folder in the quicklist causes Nautilus to completely crash for me, which also takes out anything showing on the desktop. Left-clicking the launcher icon brings it all back again, to anyone who is also affected.

    The “Open a new window” option works just fine, though.

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_GE4EYP3QOQ246PLG2Y2DOD2NIQ Dr. Fly

      Never mind, apparently I tried it out before a couple more updates came through that it depended on. Works fine now. :)

  • http://jakubrusinek.pl/ Jakub Rusinek

    It took them two years and three months to copy a feature from Windows 7. Nice.

    If UI on Linux will get rewritten even more often, such features won’t get a chance to make their way back…

    • Satchit Bhogle

      More like it took them a year to include a feature that had already been created a month after Natty was released.

      • http://jakubrusinek.pl/ Jakub Rusinek

        Nah, nobody actually cares about users.

        Canonical does its best to make money. If they wanted to please the users, they’d implement what they wish and improve where Linux sucks badly.

        • Satchit Bhogle

          I think it’s more a question of their being more busy with more important bugs. While I’d have liked if they had included it, I do disagree with your sweeping generalisation.

          • http://jakubrusinek.pl/ Jakub Rusinek

            Users care about what they use and what they’re used to.

            If you used your PC for everything (work, entertainment, gaming etc.) would you suddenly stop using Office in favour of buggy LibreOffice, stop playing favourite games and start using software that always misses a feature or is too much resource-hungry?

            Well, I tried for few years and failed. For years I couldn’t find wanted features on Linux and got to like Windows 7 and MS’s ecosystem.

          • Satchit Bhogle

            Congratulations. Many of us have failed to harbour anything more than dislike for Windows 7 and Microsoft.

            Just to clarify, I DO use my computer for everything. I’m not a big gamer, but the games I play work almost flawlessly under Wine. I write all my documents using LibreOffice, and while I complain about Writer’s UI and have a burning hatred for Impress, it does everything I need. I also use it for entertainment, and it plays all my files faster and better  than W7. In any case, I don’t see how Canonical can do much about the issues you have mentioned.

          • http://twitter.com/ianliu88 ianliu88

            Like Office isn’t buggy! LaTeX for the win

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

      Nautilus does not have quicklist support in Windows 7. This is a Nautilus feature and Gnome does not focus on Unity.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2ZXQ7BIW5R3BJ6O2UJVBHXZBCY Viet Van

    Unity is getting more and more mature. Like it :)

  • Peter Bogner

    Are there any plans to change the look of the nautilus sidebar? I really don’t like how it looks now.

    • Anonymous

      well there are some mockups of nautilus, which gnome devs might be implementing soon.

  • http://pctonic.net/ Ashutosh Mishra

    I love the jumplists in Windows 7, good to see that Unity has something similar and constantly improving it. 

  • http://facebook.com/domcan2 1roxtar

    THANK YOU!!!  I have been wanting this for a long time.  Natty kinda had it with the Places Lens, but this is much better.  With Oneric, this was one of the first things I added, a Quicklist for my Home Folder.  I am running Precise on a desktop and my own laptop.  While still being an Alpha 1, it is very stable and I get stoked as I see more and more of the niggles that irk me in 11.04 & 11.10 slowly disappearing.  Keep up the great work Canonical!!!

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

       As a development release, it’s very stable. But please don’t spread the idea that casual users can start to use it. It’s under development, which means by definition it’s not stable.

  • sarin cv

    Good to see this happen as I also supported them in brainstorm….

  • http://twitter.com/Azthma Azthma

    I am sure many of those who claim Gnome Shell is better will turn back to Unity in 12.04. :) Unity Rocks. Simple, ergonomic, efficient and on top of that all, it is smoothly beautiful, more than Mac OS desktop and the crappy Windows Aero.

    • Freddi

      Mark wants it to be “pixel-perfect”…

    • Patrick Gillespie

      Tell me that when A.) The launcher can do everything AWN can do, let alone the MAC dock or even the Windows panel. B.) When you can disable the &*%! dock or move it to the right (or anywhere I dang well please). Until I can do that, I’m an XFCE user.  And when I *do* install Unity, I have a Top Ten list of things I do:

      First: sudo apt-get remove unity unity-asset-pool unity-place-applications

      Second: sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator awn-settings synapse

      Third: Smile. Etc…

  • Anonymous

    Is it possible to install this separately to Precise in a simple fashion? i.e. is it included in a development repository for Nautilus or similar that could be installed on Oneiric/Natty?

    Also, is there a Oneiric/Natty ppa for recent Unity updates for Precise?

  • Will Moorhead

    You know what I hate? How the osx wallpaper looks good with every screenshot. Why can’t we have one like that? /sarcasm

  • A A

    I was really put off by Unity and Gnome 3. It stopped me using Linux as my main desktop as well. However it does look as though Unity is now going in the right direction. I absolutely loved Ubuntu and I used to love it when a release was due. It looks like that buzz is coming back again so I may just wait for Ubuntu 12.04 to arrive and try again.

    • Anonymous

      You know you don’t have to switch to Windows (I assume) just because of Unity and GNOME Shell. There are a BUNCH of other DE’s, e.g. XFCE, LXDE, KDE, Cinnamon, etc.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_CMTYJXZWNKQDC6PW7N3LTDZEAA Anonymous

    I have been pleasantly surprised by Unity 5. I installed the staging build and it is working better than the 11.10 release. It appears faster to me with no noticeable lag. I usually have to unity –replace once a day. I haven’t had to do that since I installed it. Surprising. I think it might actually work now to do real work.

 
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