Useful modifications for Nautilus in Ubuntu GNOME 13.04
Published on 12th September 2013 Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutesThe changes made to Nautilus, otherwise known as Files, in GNOME Shell 3.6 were contentious and the response of the Linux Mint was to create their own variant called Nemo from the previous version of the application. On the Cinnamon or MATE desktop environments, the then latest version of GNOME's file manager would have looked like a fish out of water without its application menu in the top panel on the GNOME Shell desktop. It is possible to make a few modifications that help Nautilus to look more at home on those Linux Mint desktops, and I have collected them here because they are useful for GNOME Shell users too. Here they are in turn.
Adding Application Menu entries to Location Options Menu
The Location Options menu is what you get on clicking the button with the cog icon on the right-hand side of the application's location bar. Using Gsettings, it is possible to make that menu include the sort of entries that are in the application menu in the GNOME Shell panel at the top of the screen. These include an entry for closing the whole application, as well as setting its preferences (or options). Running the following command does just that (if it does not work as it should, try changing the single and double quotes to those understood by a command shell):
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides '@a{sv} {"Gtk/ShellShowsAppMenu": <int32 0>}'
Adding in the Remove App Menu GNOME Shell extension will clean up the GNOME Shell a little by removing the application menu altogether. If, for some reason, you wish to restore the default behaviour, then the following command does the required reset:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides '@a{sv} {}'
Stopping Hiding of the Application Title Bar When Maximised
By default, GNOME Shell can hide the application title bars of GNOME applications such as Nautilus on window maximisation and this is Nautilus now works by default. Changing the behaviour so that the title bar is kept on maximised windows can be as simple as adding in the ignore_request_hide_titlebar extension. The trouble with GNOME Shell extensions is that they can stop working when a new version of GNOME Shell is used, so there's another option: editing metacity-theme-3.xml but /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1. The file can be opened using superuser privileges using the following command:
gksudo gedit /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml
With the file open, it is a matter of replacing instances of ' has_title="false" ' with ' has_title="true" ', saving it and reloading GNOME Shell. This may persevere across different versions of GNOME Shell, should the extension not do so.
The last one doesn't work anymore.
The ppa has moved
Sadly, I have to agree with you and have turned to using Thunar instead to see how that goes and it looks fine so far. Nemo cannot be installed independently of Cinnamon (it brings along dependencies that didn't play well with GNOME Shell when I last tried it) so that has to be give a miss for now.
That out of date section is gone now