Nautilus might be getting a neater way to organise its file views, with section headers breaking up long lists of content into groups.
GNOME’s Christian Hergertr recently added support for section headers to GTK’s gridView, the widget Nautilus (among other apps) use to display items.
Nautilus developer Peter Eisenmann commented to say he was ‘thrilled’ by the merge, noting that ‘Nautilus could make good use of this’.
Indeed, an upstream commit to add headers to GNOME’s file manager to add labelled divisions for folders and files.
Nautilus already sorts folders ahead of files, of course, but section headers make the distinction more obvious – useful if someone is scanning a folder.
Using section headers to do more?
Right now, Nautilus renders files in one swoop. You can sort contents based by date, size or recency, but it’s still a uniform block of icons you’re sifting through.
Section headers render as separate rows rather than one continual one, and could be used to segment content in a smarter way. That would make it easier for uses to scan and find things visually, depending on what’s needed and when.
For instance, take sorting files by date. Files could be sectioned by time period, e.g., Today, Past 7 Days, Older (as they are in Finder on macOS). Then, rather than scanning and scrolling one long list, you can jump straight to the period you need and look there.
All of what that is me thinking aloud, not what I’ve seen Nautilus’ developers propose or hint at at – the potential is there though.
Development means experimenting
This is an early WIP with no indication, beyond the commit mentioned further up, of how Nautilus plans to use sectioning. GNOME 52 is in active development and developers will test, experiment and, where needed, revert changes.