Getting a handle on Nautilus

[Seth]

Dotan Cohen wrote:
> I am really enjoying Nautilus (moved from Dolphin) but I have a few
> remaining things that I simply cannot figure out how to do. If someone
> could help, that would be great!
>   
I second that. Although the stability of the UI in Nautilus is what
keeps me with Nautilus. I really liked the 'windowsy' rich featureset
when working with KDE3 Dolphin.
> 1) How to sort by Name, Date Modified, or Size with a keyboard
> shortcut or icon. I know that I can dig in the menus, or I can do
> multiple keyboard shortcuts (such as Alt-V,G,D or Alt-V,G,N) but I'd
> like to make that a single shortcut for Name, a single shortcut for
> Date, and a single shortcut for Size. Or at least have icons for
> sorting by these in the toolbar.
>
>   
You _could_ click the headers. Or about 5x tab and space/enter will do
the trick. Yes this doesn't beat keyboard accelerators, but I got used
to it (keyboard-only species here. I prefer to do my word processing in
vim, e.g.).
> 2) Split screen? Does Nautilus not do this?
>   
Unbeknownst te me
> 3) Some shortcuts seem to be doubly-assigned, such as Ctrl-F. Although
> the context menu has F underlined for New Folder, it actually opens
> the File menu. I don't see how to create a new folder with a keyboard
> shortcut. How? And can I add an icon for New Folder on the toolbar?
>   
I'm pretty sure you are getting the working of the context menu wrong.
The underlined characters are _not_ supposed to be invoked with
Alt/Ctrl. Once the popup has been activated you can simply hit the bare
letter (f, not F) to execute the 'New _F_older' menu entry.

That said, it annoys me that when using the context menu key to bring up
the context menu, there is no 'New _Folder_' menu item because Nautilus
will _always_ assume the context of the current selection (which is a
file/folder item) and bring up the context menu for that type of item,
instead of the one for a folder view (try rightclick on an empty area
instead of on an item to see the difference).

All that said, '_F_ile' menu lists: 'Create _F_older    Shift+Ctrl+N'.
So it'd be either 'Alt-F, F' or 'Shift+Ctrl+N' to invoke the action. Not
too hard....
> 4) There are three toolbars: menu toolbar, icon toolbar, addressbar.
> Can I put the icons on the menu toolbar or on the addressbar, as
> Firefox lets one do? Ideally, they would _all_ be on the same bar to
> save vertical space (I do have Firefox configured like this).
>   
Fraid not. I think it is because Firefox is not Gnome...
> Thanks!
>
>
>   

[1] In fact, Alt would on windows close the context menu. This was a
real pain with the invention of 'Hide keyboard accessors until I press
Alt'. But that is a different story:)

Seth