TL;DR: Please reintroduce the treeview sidebar feature.
I know this has been discussed in 2010 in the thread "The Future of Nautilus: Tree Sidebar and Split View" [1] in this very list, but apparently it wasn't any kind of successful, so I'm starting again. I recently reported a bug about the tree side pane being gone from Nautilus 3.6: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=710589. This got closed today as "Resolved, duplicate" of bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697739. Fair enough, my report is a kind of duplicate, even though the other one looked more like "the key doesn't work this is a bug" rather than "the side tree view is gone this is a missing feature", but whatever. What really puzzles me is that the other bug was itself closed as a duplicate of https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676897. This last bug is about *removing* the sidebar, and I must say I see no rationale here, plus a complete and utter ignorance of the comments saying they don't like the removal. The rationale in the bug is "It is inconsistent with the file chooser, doesn't work well with touch, is really hard to use, and isn't consistent with any other GNOME 3 apps.". I don't see much argument here: 1) "It is inconsistent with the file chooser" -- if you want full consistency, add a tree sidebar to the file chooser, but honestly the file chooser is for *saving of selecting a file*, while Nautilus is a *file manager*. Managing files is a much more complex task than choosing one, so having an additional feature in Nautilus makes full sense. Moreover, the places sidebar was the *default* in any new install, so it was "inconsistent" only to those who *willfully* chose the option in Nautilus. 2) "doesn't work well with touch" -- I'm sorry but I honestly don't give a damn about touch, I'm a *DESKTOP* user, like probably more than 80% of the Gnome users. And as many in the above report noted, the touch users weren't forced to use that panel, it wasn't even the default! 3) "is really hard to use" -- subjective for sure, and I'm counter-arguing that without the tree side view I just cannot use Nautilus sensibly. How do I move files from "a/b" to "a/c"? This is clearly not easy, and having 2 separate windows is inconvenient and not practical for people with small screens. 4) "and isn't consistent with any other GNOME 3 apps" -- which apps, and why isn't it consistent? And even, the other apps are NOT file manager! and again, the sidebar tree view WASN'T EVEN THE DEFAULT. So those 4 reasons don't seem to me anything like close to legitimate the removal. And you'll see that starting with comment 13 (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676897#c13) the users start to complain and ask for the feature to come back -- but since the report is closed, nobody notices and nobody cares. It wouldn't be so frustrating if *NEW* reports asking for the tree view to come back weren't closed as "duplicates" of the *very opposite report that REMOVED it* with no further explanation. So again, please reintroduce the tree view sidebar, I cannot use Nautilus without it. Please. If you don't like how it was implemented before, fair enough, you can e.g. merge it with the Place sidebar by allowing to unfold the tree beneath each item, but please, reintroduce the feature. Regards, Colomban [1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2010-June/msg00035.html -- nautilus-list mailing list nautilus-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list