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

Thumbnailing

Trash

Desktop

Icon View

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:

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.



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

  • should there be an File->Empty trash item? - marked WONTFIX - maints need to be convinced on the nautilus list if it is to be "fixed"
  • Should be able to sort by "when file was binned" in Trash folder
  • Trash should have "undelete" operation
  • Nautilus might popup a dialog if a user drags removable media into the trash

    Misc

  • remove "switch to manual layout mode" dialog - marked WONTFIX - maints need to be convinced on the nautilus list if it is to be "fixed"
  • "New Document" hierarchical menu
  • pressing back does not bring you to your previous position
  • views should scroll when dragging and dropping
  • Single click by default
  • View->hidden files
  • Nautilus forgets/changes path when entering symbolic link
  • Creating new panels through the desktop's context menu
  • Launchers and links need to be merged. Nautilus should not create symbolic links.
  • Correct location of nautilus desktop: $HOME, $HOME/Desktop (as KDE), other?
  • Turn off the sidebar and location bar by default
  • copy and paste should be pick up and drop
  • the home icon should use your actual first name from /etc/passwd and not your log-in
  • Should be able to browse archives in nautilus and other applications with vfs
  • Nautilus lacks snap to grid
  • remove Start Here panel bug "should have a "Entire Menu-> Browse" item" should be a dep
  • http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=82463">Remove "new window" from File manager context menu's
  • Should be able to edit launchers in their properties window..

    File opening and properties