How to Access Few "Advanced Preferences" Settings in Nautilus File Manager?

Nautilus is the default file management utility in Gnome desktop environment (which is also shared by the Ubuntu Unity as well). Although Gnome had been folliwng a lot of Mac OSX type desktop design ideas for a long time now, thus it's a highly simplified desktop these days. Yet in the past it used to come with a hell lot of options or customizable abilities.

Luckily, for the advanced users ;-), we can access some of those "dropped" features via the built in Gnome desktop database configuration utility called Gconf Editor. So using this we can change few additional settings concerning Nautilus with ease which are otherwise, "hidden".

For instance, once right click-ed on a file/folder and accessed its properties, currently Nautilus does let us change the permissions with a pretty simplified window which is cool. But...

There's certainly nothing wrong with this... but I just happened to like the "old" window since it helps to speedup things a bit (adding permissions I meant :D)...

... if you want a little more control over the file and folder permissions window (including few more options such as set user and group IDS, sticky) and in comparison, this "advanced permissions" (it's not that advanced actually since the default one come with almost all the features, except for those mentioned "3" features) makes it easy to adjust the permissions in my experience.

But some of these preferences are already in the default "preferences" section in Nautilus but you can access few additional settings such as:

The "preferences' section of Nautilus in Gconf-editor's database...

*. Make Nautilus always display a "location entry" type bar rather than the default "Path bar".

*. Directory limit: Another useful feature (not for all the users though). For instance, let's say that you have a folder filled with thousands of files, etc.

Although Nautilus is more than capable of handling a "heavy weight" folders these days yet if you have some "massive folders" then you can manually assign a number that Nautilus will take into account while dealing with them. The default value is "-1" means "unlimited". As said, I just mentioned this but I don't think most of us would wanna change this anyhow.

*. Disable/Enable mount forward and back buttons.

*. Change how Nautilus search for files (whether using just the "text" you typed or properties).

*. Show Desktop: Just like with Gnome 3 (yikes! :D), if you disable this function, then Nautilus will disable your Desktop completely. Although nothing on your desktop will be lost (created folders and files) but your mouse right click or anything on the desktop will be hidden!.

These are just a few to mention. Anyhow, how can you access these "hidden" preferences in Nautilus using the Gconf-editor?

1. Pretty simple actually. First press the "Alt" + "F2" keys and put the below command into the box and press enter.

gconf-editor

Now from your left, go to: "Applications" -> "nautilus" -> "preferences".

This should openup a window similar to to the below one. Now to your right side you should see few options which you can use to access some of the ones that are hidden by default.

For instance, let's say that I wanted to enable the "Advanced Permissions" dialog in Nautilus. Then, from the "Preferences" section scroll-down until you see an option called "show_advanced_permissions" and make sure to put a "tick" on its box which should give you a slightly "advanced" file/folder permissions windows as with below screenshot.

That's about it. Use it with caution ;-)...

Two Things for Making Nautilus File Manager Faster

Remember, if you're a multimedia geek :P and want to make the Nautilus file manager to make your life more easier, then you won't like these tips for sure. But for few of us, just use it as a file manager and to make it more faster, although by doing these changes won't make it super fast, but they sometimes do help.

It just takes few seconds to make the changes and if you aren't impressed by it, then you can easily disable the changes nonetheless.

So, open the Nautilus and from the menu choose, "Edit" -> "Preference" -> "Preview". Now you should get a window similar to the below.

1. Show thumbnails - As you can see, the default option is "Local files Only". By clicking on that button you'll get a menu from that choose "Never".

Beware that by doing so, you're disabling Nautilus creating thumbnail previews of video and images while browsing.

Or, if you want your images to show as thumbnails but want the video thumbnails to be disabled, then keep the "Local files Only", option and click on the "Only for files smaller than" and choose a low value (500KB or 1MB for instance, do some testing...).

Since videos usually come with bigger values/sizes, this should disable creating those previews but unless you have some high quality images with bigger in sizes, most of your images should be showed as thumbnails. 

2. Preview sound files - If you don't want Nautilus to automatically generate previews of audio files when your mouse go over them, then as before, click on the button and choose "Never".

This mainly helps to prevent calling for the Nautilus addons every time you go over the files which requires both CPU and RAM mainly (should speed up under "heavy" audio file collection folders sometimes).

3. Count number of items - Although you can disable this, still Nautilus counts the items... So... at the moment, you can't disable it (would have been handy). :)