The Nautilus file-manager included in Ubuntu is… well.. crowded. We already saw some changes developers are taking to tame to the vast areas of wasted space and useless buttons in our over-view of Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 and prior to that we drooled over a ‘Simplified Nautilus‘ – which is sadly no longer updated.
Nautilus Just Got Gorgeous
If you seek something even more elegant and tight you may want to install the following patched version of Nautilus by the Elementary Team.
Elementary Nautilus; toolbars merged, stop/reload buttons combined.Not only does it look nicer – it’s stable, a more recent build than that in Ubuntu and… well.. it looks nicer! Look!
By merging the toolbars, buttons and breadcrumbs, Elementary Nautilus makes the best use of space. And yes! You can still have your sidebar, too!
Installation
Open a terminal and type the following commands, hitting your return/enter key after each.
- sudo add-apt-repository ppa:am-monkeyd/nautilus-elementary-ppa
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get upgrade
Then either log out and back in to use the new Nautilus or manually do it by pressing Alt+F2 and typing: –
- pkill nautilus
Now we need to launch nautilus, so press Alt+F2 again, this time entering: –
- nautilus
To hide/show the “menu bar” as in the screenshot hit Alt+M.
To toggle the sidebar use ‘F9’.
Uninstall instructions
If you try it and decide you miss excessive chrome you can install the “old” nautilus in a few clicks.
- Remove the above PPA from your sources list (System > Admin > Software Sources > Other Software): –
- Then run the following commands: –
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo aptitude install nautilus