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The Nautilus (Files) file manager has received more new features ahead of the GNOME 46 desktop environment release in late March 2024 as the devs published a new alpha build over the weekend.
The GNOME 46 desktop environment is currently available for public alpha testing and Nautilus received an update that brought improved discoverability of custom folder icons, password confirmations when creating protected ZIP archives, and the ability to change owner/group and other permissions under admin:///.
The alpha build also added detection of copy/move operations of files over the 4GB limit on FAT filesystems, a detailed date and time format option, as well as the ability to revert more than one Alt+Up with the Alt+Down keybinding.
Now, a new alpha build of Nautilus 46 is available for public testing with even more new features, including the ability to switch views without reloading the folder, replacement of Other Locations with the Network view (the Network view was postponed for future release), listing of mounted drives in the sidebar, subfolder loading indication, the ability to record selected files in back and forward history, and listing of operations in the bottom of the sidebar.
On top of that, the new Nautilus 46 alpha build improves the performance of the multi-file properties dialog, improves the view performance, displays sampling frequency in kHz with thousand separators, fixes thumbnail prioritization for non-alphabetical sort order, opens the real folder for documents in Recent from Properties, and treats markdown files as text documents in search.
On top of that, it improves the handling of virtual files, adds a tooltip to the star button, improves the UI text capitalization and mnemonics, shows the correct keyboard shortcut for Redo on the menu, fixes tab tooltip texts for markup and search, notifies view item name changes for accessibility, and plugs various view-related bugs, memory leaks, and warnings for a more stable and reliable experience.
The devs also made significant restructuring of the view architecture, removed dead code in views and CSS styles, and updated the man page. Early adopters who want to take this new alpha build of Nautilus for a test drive on the GNOME 46 desktop environment can download and compile the source tarball from here.
The next step in the development cycle of the upcoming GNOME 46 desktop environment is the beta version, which is currently slated for mid-February 2024, alongside the GNOME 45.4 and GNOME 44.9 stable builds. The Release Candidate (RC) version of GNOME 46 is expected in early March, while the final release is slated for March 20th, 2024.
Update: 14/02/2024: The article has been updated to note the fact that the new Network view was postponed for a future release as it needs more work.
Last updated 2 months ago
