Nautilus 3.17.2 is now available for testing

May 31, 2015 03:43 GMT  ·  By

The Nautilus (Files) open-source file manager used in numerous GNU/Linux distributions has recently been updated as part of the GNOME 3.17.2 desktop environment, the second milestone towards GNOME 3.18.

According to the attached release notes, Nautilus 3.17.2, which is the first unstable milestone towards Nautilus 3.18, brings numerous under-the-hood and user-visible changes, but it also fixes many of the bugs that have been reported by users or discovered by the Nautilus developers since the previous stable version of the software.

Looking at the changelog, we can notice a fix for some window focus issues that occurred when starting the file manager, a fix for the handling of the command-line options in certain cases, as well as the addition of a public API (Application Programming Interface) documentation for developers who want to create Nautilus extensions.

Furthermore, the user interface suffered some modifications, as the developers have decreased the padding on the list view, and are now using a separate dialog for renaming and creating files or folders, which was actually introduced a while ago. Also, the zoom slider has been modified to be its preference.

Nautilus 3.18 will bring many other noteworthy improvements

Among some other noteworthy improvements, we can mention that Nautilus now allows users to use the F5 key or CTRL+R keyboard shortcut to refresh the contents, fixes the inconsistency of icon sizes and addresses an issue with the view scrolling that occurred when selecting items with CTRL + mouse click, and it now allows for opening folders with an external application.

Additionally, a gsetting has been implemented to make it easy to toggle recursive search, the "Delete Permanently" option is now displayed on operating systems that do not support Trash, it is now possible to open multiple files with a different application than the default one, the sidebar won't always appear when Nautilus starts, and the Alt+down arrow keyboard shortcut has been added to the opening of files and folders.

As usual, it is possible to download the Nautilus (Files) 3.17.2 sources right now from Softpedia, but please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version that might contain unresolved issues, which could render the software unusable in certain circumstances.

Nautilus 3.17.2 Changelog