My Favorite Nautilus bugs and Issues

I've noticed on the nautilus list recently, a lot of people submitting patches to fix various bugs. And on gnome-love and the Gnome Users' Board there are a lot of people asking for things to do in gnome. There seem to be a lot of people who love gnome and can program and want to give a little back, but really don't know gnome well enough to know where to start.

I personally have very limited coding skills but one thing I have is a pretty good knowledge of what's going on in gnome-land. There is a lot that needs doing. There are a lot of bugs, and nautilus has the most of them IIRC. The one problem: the bugzilla interface is almost completely useless if you don't already have an idea of what you are looking for. It can take weeks to get to know the nautilus bugzilla module. I'm hoping that by putting up this list of the bugs that I can save people some time and effort. The main focus of the 2.2 list below is on relatively easy to fix bugs. Individually they are not massively disruptive, but put together they amount to a lot of inconsistencies and broken behavior in nautilus. Crash bugs tend to get a lot of attention, but there are a lot of usability issues with nautilus that would be nice to get fixed.

Nautilus 2.2.x has recently been released but because there are still so many bugs that need to be fixed for both the 2.2 and 2.3 seriesies Nautilus is not going to be branched in CVS for quite a while. That makes this an ideal time to subit patches for these 2.2 bugs. The 2.3 bugs at the end of this page are not fixable until we branch for 2.3.

If you have a bug that you think should be added to the list, or if one of the bugs below has been resolved and should be removed from this list send me an e-mail or just cc me on the bug.

LAter,
MArk Finlay

2.2.x Nautilus bugs

General

• keyboard navigation initially broken on new windows
• File/Folder Name does not wrap if too wide for the side bar.
• refuse to link large file when there is little free space
• No padding on the in the text view
• Fixed: Sidebar does not remember state
• Tree view focus doesn't follow file view pane
• home icon on desktop and the real home directory have separate sets of emblems
• [Patch]Double-clicking by single clicking two different files quickly
• right clicking on a dir and saying paste should paste into that dir.
• ctrl modifier should toggle move when dragging to another file system
• System link directories don't get monitored by fam
• when nautilus crashes it respawns a draws a new windows showing $HOME
• Nautilus silently stops if copying soft link fails
• Default zoom level changes font sizes on all zoom levels

Thumbnailing

• stop button should stop thumbnail creation
• Nautilus should pass open windows ahead in the thumbnailing queue
• Nautilus continues creating thumbnails after turning off the pref
• we need an explicit "Make Thumbnail" command.

Trash

• SHIFT + Del should delete a file without putting it in the trash
• View as List doesn't appear in menu in trash:
• Trash bin should have a different context menu
• Trash icon not "nice" in home view
• Trash icon on desktop should display size beneath it
• Trash breaks if the home directory is a symlink
• .Trash folders are deleted on "Move to trash"
• No way to move a file currently being viewed into the trash

Desktop

• Nautilus 2.1.6 drags when choosen view the home directory in the desktop
• disks menu should be refreshed when fstab changed
• no way to edit launchers on the desktop
• drag of NFS mounted directory on desktop does copy instead of reposition -- Possible dupe, needs to be verified: Dangerous behavior when moving the icon for a partition mounted in home dir
• new files on the edge of the desktop mis-aligned
• desktop ignores alternative keybindings specified in the file-manager xml for delete

Icon View

• New folder not created at cursor position
• artifacts when changing zoom mode

List View

The list view is REALLY messed up ATM IMHO. I cannot remember exactly what the Nautilus 1.x list view looked like, but to
me the current state of the list view feels like a regression, and makes it almost un-usable. That said, it has been greatly
improved recently, but there are still some very important issues left:

• single click mode: file deselection doesn't work
• rows are too tall
• icon/thumbnails too big and getting cropped in list view
• when you create a new folder it should be in rename mode
• DND in single click list view doesnt work
• Rename loses focus when 'fam' notification updates view
• File names in the list view should not be underlined
• single click: list view should have mouse-over
• No way to get context menu for current folder

File opening and properties

Anyone who has ever tried to do something with more than one file at once in nautilus will notice that it can behave quite
oddly. These two bugs cover the "Open" and "Open with" items. There is also a bug below in the 2.3 section dealing with the fact
that you cannot have a properties dialog for more than one file at once.

• can't use 'open with >' when two or more file selected NOTE: relates only to files of same mime
• "Open" the same as "Open in X new windows" with multiple files
• Should be able to manually specify a command (ala the run dialog) to open a file with
• When multiple files of different mime are selected "Open With" should default to asking you for a command, or maybe should show items for all selected mimes

2.3.x Nautilus bugs

Some of these issues are not filed yet, and I haven't filed them cus I'm not fully sure about my opinions on them.

Trash