It's not even consistent within Nautilus itself - type-ahead works fine in a "pop up file browser" when saving a file from an application or downloading a file from a browser. It's only the fewer cases where you manually launch the file browser from the desktop that it behaves different for some reason.
It's always disappointing to see software developers of popular software get a bee in their bonnet over something like this, staunchly ignoring a widely used, simple feature simply because they themselves don't use it. I've seen this in the Atom Text editor too, where they closed the thread of 100's of posts asking for block select, with a dismissive "I don't think this thread is helping anyone anymore." So I switched to Sublime, which does have it. Type-ahead is in literally every other OS I've tried. Admittedly not many, but when that list involves nearly every release of Windows, Linux Mint, and Fedora, you really have to wonder why someone would choose to stick their fingers in their ears over this one - not even as an option, even somewhere buried away in a config - it's just plain disabled forever - but the functionality DOES exist in the system because it works in "popup file browsers". It's like giving the middle finger to people who regularly use this productivity time-saver. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to nautilus in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1666681 Title: Restore interactive_search.patch (type-ahead search) Status in nautilus package in Ubuntu: Won't Fix Bug description: Nautilus dropped the popular type-ahead search feature years ago. Ubuntu has been carrying a patch to revert that change. See bug 1164016 for the original LP bug and patch proposal. Nautilus is now under very active development. During the 3.22 cycle, that patch needed to be rebased. I tried to do it and what I came up with caused a crash (it didn't really crash for me, but ricotz and some others experienced it) and the first letter typed activated type- ahead search but the first letter was dropped. In other words, you would need to type "ddow" to activate the Downloads folder instead of just "dow" like in previous releases. (LP: #1635988) I did that rebase in October 2016 and no one has stepped up then to improve the patch. The Nautilus maintainer csoriano has said that the slots and views changed significantly during 3.22 and will likely be refactored more in the future. If there's no one available to maintain the patch, unfortunately, we'll eventually have to drop the patch to not be stuck on an ancient version of Nautilus. I am proposing that we do this at the start of the 17.10 development cycle. This gives 6 months for a developer to step up and try to fix the patch and 12 months before 18.04 LTS. Other Items =========== - For better performance with the built-in search, we need to reconsider avoiding tracker in Unity (LP: #1666676) - There is an option in Preferences for users to disable searching in subfolders. I don't think we want to do that by default but maybe it can help some people. The current Nautilus 3.24 packaging is in the GNOME3 Staging PPA with this patch now disabled. https://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team/+archive/ubuntu/gnome3-staging/+packages?field.series_filter=zesty To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1666681/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp