Nautilus could be getting a neater way to organise its file views, with section headers breaking up long lists of content into groups.

Nautilus screenshot showing folders and files grouped separately under headed sections.
Image: Peter Eisenmann

GNOME’s Christian Hergert recently added support for section headers to GTK’s gridView, the widget which Nautilus and 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 adds headers to GNOME’s file manager, with 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.

This article is about a change in a development version of Nautilus. What you see here is not finished or finalised and should not be judged as such.

Using section headers to do more?

Mockup illustrating Nautilus file manager section headers grouping files by date.
One use-case, mocked up

Right now, Nautilus renders files in one swoop.

You can sort contents 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 continuous one, and could be used to segment content in a smarter way.

For instance, sorting files by date. Finder on macOS uses sections by time period, e.g., Today, Past 7 Days, Older.

With this approach, rather than scanning and scrolling one long list (squinting a date stamps to spot the right number) you can go to the section for the time period you need and look there.

Nautilus‘ developers haven’t proposed or hinted at implementing that, it’s just me giving an example of how section headers can be functionally useful with context.

Development means experimenting

This whole effort is all an early work in progress. There’s no indication, beyond the commit mentioned further up, on exactly how Nautilus plans to use sectioning going forward.

GNOME 52 is in active development and developers will use that time to test, experiment and gather feedback.