GNOME Files, formerly and internally known as Nautilus, is the official

file manager A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening (e.g. viewing, playing, editing or pr ...

for the

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

desktop. Nautilus was originally developed by

Eazel Eazel was an American software company operating from 1999 to 2001 in Palo Alto and then Mountain View, California. The company's flagship product is the Nautilus file manager for the GNOME desktop environment on Linux, which was immediately adopt ...

with many luminaries from the tech world including

Andy Hertzfeld Andrew Jay Hertzfeld (born April 6, 1953) is an American software engineer and innovator who was a member of the original Apple Macintosh development team during the 1980s. After buying an Apple II in January 1978, he went to work for App ...

(Apple), chief architect for Nautilus. The nautilus name was a play on words, evoking the

shell Shell may refer to: Architecture and design * Shell (structure), a thin structure ** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses ** Thin-shell structure Science Biology * Seashell, a hard o ...

of a

nautilus The nautilus (, ) is a pelagic marine mollusc of the cephalopod family Nautilidae. The nautilus is the sole extant family of the superfamily Nautilaceae and of its smaller but near equal suborder, Nautilina. It comprises six living species in ...

to represent an

operating system shell In computing, a shell is a computer program that exposes an operating system's services to a human user or other programs. In general, operating system shells use either a command-line interface (CLI) or graphical user interface (GUI), depending ...

. Nautilus replaced

Midnight Commander GNU Midnight Commander (also known as mc, the command used to start it, and as mouseless commander in older versions) is a free cross-platform orthodox file manager. It was started by Miguel de Icaza in 1994 as a clone of the then-popular Nor ...

in GNOME 1.4 (2001) and has been the default file manager from version 2.0 onwards. Nautilus was the

flagship product A core product or flagship product is a company's primary promotion, service or product that can be purchased by a consumer. Core products may be integrated into end products, either by the company producing the core product or by other companies ...

of the now-defunct

Inc and was released under the terms of the

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

. It is

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

software.

History

Nautilus was originally developed by

and

(founder of Eazel and a former

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancest ...

engineer) in 1999. Nautilus was first released in 2001 and development has continued ever since. The following is a brief timeline of its development history: * Version 1.0 was released on March 13, 2001, and incorporated into GNOME 1.4. * Version 2.0 was a port to GTK+ 2.0. * Version 2.2 included changes to make it more compliant with User Interface Guidelines. * Version 2.4 switched the desktop folder to ~/Desktop (the ~ represents the user's "Home" folder) to be compliant with freedesktop.org standards. * In the version included with

2.6, Nautilus switched to a spatial interface. Several

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

s have made "browser" mode the default. The "classic" interface is still available: ** By a

filing cabinet A filing cabinet (or sometimes file cabinet in American English) is a piece of office furniture for storing paper documents in file folders. In the most simple context, it is an enclosure for drawers in which items are stored. The two most comm ...

shaped icon. ** By an option in the "Edit -> Preferences -> Behavior" menu in Nautilus. ** In a folder's context menu. ** By using the "--browser" switch when started by a command via a launcher or

. * GNOME 2.14 introduced a version of Nautilus with improved searching, integrated optional

Beagle The beagle is a breed of small scent hound, similar in appearance to the much larger foxhound. The beagle was developed primarily for hunting hare, known as beagling. Possessing a great sense of smell and superior tracking instincts, th ...

support and the ability to save searches as

virtual folder In computing, a virtual folder generally denotes an organizing principle for files that is not dependent on location in a hierarchical directory tree. Instead, it consists of software that coalesces results from a data store, which may be a databa ...

s. * With the release of GNOME 2.22, Nautilus was ported to the newly introduced GVfs, the replacement virtual file system for the aging GnomeVFS. * The 2.24 stable release of Nautilus adds some new features, mainly tabbed browsing and better tab completion. * With GNOME 2.30, Nautilus reverted from a spatial interface to a browser navigational model by default. * The 2.32 release introduced a dialog for handling conflicts when performing copy or move operations, transparency icon effect when cutting files into folder and enhanced the Wastebucket with Restore files. Besides, this is the last version that is based on GTK2 before the move to GNOME 3.0 with GTK3. Nautilus 2.x was forked to Caja, as well as MATE Desktop from Gnome 2.x after Gnome 3.0. Today both Mate and Caja are based on GTK3. * GNOME 3.0 completely revamped the UX of Nautilus with focus on sidebar and icons. Additionally, the Connect to Server dialog is also enhanced. Nautilus was ported to GTK3. * Version 3.4 added Undo functionality. * Version 3.6 introduced a revamped UI design, symbolic sidebar icon, new search feature, removal of many features such as setting window background, emblems, split pane mode, spatial mode, scripts, compact view mode and tree view. Nautilus' application name was renamed to Files, Though it is still called Nautilus internally in some distributions. These major changes led to a lot of criticism, and various vendors such as

Linux Mint Linux Mint is a community-driven Linux distribution based on Ubuntu (which is in turn based on Debian), bundled with a variety of free and open-source applications. It can provide full out-of-the-box multimedia support for those who choose to i ...

decided to fork version 3.4. * Version 3.8 included a new option to view files and folders as a tree, a new Connect to Server item in the sidebar and incremental loading of search results. * Version 3.10 introduced a slightly revamped UI design in which titlebars and toolbars were merged into a single element called header bars. * Version 3.18 introduced integration with

Google Drive Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google. Launched on April 24, 2012, Google Drive allows users to store files in the cloud (on Google's servers), synchronize files across devices, and share files. In add ...

and GOA (gnome-online-accounts) settings.

Features

Bookmarks, window backgrounds, notes, and add-on scripts are all implemented, and the user has the choice between icon, list, or compact list views. In browser mode, Nautilus keeps a history of visited folders, similar to web browsers, permitting quick revisiting of folders. Nautilus can display previews of files in their icons, be they text files, images, sound or video files via thumbnailers such as

Totem A totem (from oj, ᑑᑌᒼ, italics=no or '' doodem'') is a spirit being, sacred object, or symbol that serves as an emblem of a group of people, such as a family, clan, lineage, or tribe, such as in the Anishinaabe clan system. While ''the ...

. Audio files are previewed (played back over

GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes the ...

) when the pointer is hovering over them. In earlier versions, Nautilus included original vectorized icons designed by Susan Kare.

File system abstraction

GNOME Files relies on a file system

abstraction layer In computing, an abstraction layer or abstraction level is a way of hiding the working details of a subsystem. Examples of software models that use layers of abstraction include the OSI model for network protocols, OpenGL, and other graphics libr ...

(provided by GVfs) to browse local and remote file systems, including but not limited to FTP sites, Windows SMB shares,

OBEX OBEX (abbreviation of OBject EXchange, also termed IrOBEX) is a communications protocol that facilitates the exchange of binary objects between devices. It is maintained by the Infrared Data Association but has also been adopted by the Bluetooth S ...

protocol (often implemented on cellphones),

files transferred over shell protocol Files transferred over Shell protocol (FISH) is a network protocol that uses Secure Shell (SSH) or Remote Shell (RSH) to transfer files between computers and manage remote files. The advantage of FISH is that all it requires on the server-side ...

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

and

WebDAV WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for con ...

and SFTP servers. Using the GIO library, Nautilus tracks modification of local files in real time, eliminating the need to refresh the display. GIO internally supports Gamin and FAM, Linux's

inotify inotify ( inode notify) is a Linux kernel subsystem created by John McCutchan, which monitors changes to the filesystem, and reports those changes to applications. It can be used to automatically update directory views, reload configuration file ...

and Solaris' File Events Notification system.

File indexing and file search framework

GNOME Files relies on Tracker (formerly named "MetaTracker") to index file and is hence able to provide fast file search results.

Batch renaming

Batch renaming Batch renaming is a form of batch processing used to rename multiple computer files and folders in an automated fashion, in order to save time and reduce the amount of work involved. Some sort of software is required to do this. Such software can b ...

was introduced with GNOME Files version 3.22 (2016).

Archive handling

GNOME Files version 3.22 adds native, integrated file compression and decompression. By default, handling of archive files (e.g. .tar .gz) was handed off to File Roller (or another tool). Users now benefit from a progress bar, undo support, and an archive creation wizard. The new ''"extract on open"'' behavior, which automatically extracts an archive file by double clicking it, can be disabled in the preferences.

MIME types

MIME type A media type (also known as a MIME type) is a two-part identifier for file formats and format contents transmitted on the Internet. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the official authority for the standardization and publication o ...

s (also called "media type" or "content type") are standardized by the

IANA The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Interne ...

, then the freedesktop.org project takes care that the implementation works across all free software desktops. shared-mime-info is the provided library. At this time, at least GNOME, KDE, Xfce and ROX use this database.

References

External links

* *
GNOME Files GitLab Repository

{{File managers 2001 software File managers that use GTK Free file managers Free software programmed in C GNOME Core Applications Software that uses Meson