Extra Pane in Nautilus

[Robert Bruce Park]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 06:12:49PM -0400, Greg Williams wrote:
> I have no use for Nautilus if it doesn't support the Extra Pane. This is one of
> the most used features of Nautilus by my friends and me. It's one of the "linux
> things" that pulled me away from using Windows and Windows Explorer. I like
> Gnome 3x but some of the decision those developers make are really poorly
> thought out.

Now, I can't speak for the Gnome developers, but I did read a lot
about this issue back when the controversy first started, and I
believe it boils down to this:

* Both Gnome 3 and Unity make it very easy to tile windows such that
  one takes up the left half of your screen, and the other takes up
  the right half of the screen. This is essentially the same thing as
  having an "extra pane", but it's "better" because your window
  manager is better at managing windows than nautilus is. So all the
  drag&dropping that you used to enjoy doing between panes, you can
  still do between windows.

* Also, other parts of Nautilus have been improved to compensate for
  the loss of the pane. For example, if you want to easily move files
  into a parent folder, you can drag them directly to the breadcrumb
  view along the top and they get moved to that folder. Or, if you
  want to create a new subfolder for a group of files, you can select
  them, and there's an option in the rightclick menu that will create
  a new folder and move them into it, with a single click.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree, just that that is what I had read
at the time, and those other features look nice to me. I personally
don't miss the extra pane at all. As you said yourself, it was
confusing to figure out which one had focus at any given time. Having
independent windows side by side makes that much clearer.