Navigate through your files using Linux

The easiest way to open Nautilus is from the Places menu. Select Home Folder to view your documents. Note that Nautilus offers several ways to customise the view. From the View menu, you can show or hide various elements, such as the toolbar. You can also select between View as icons for a chunky icon view, or View as list for a more compact and detailed view. For more options, click Edit, then Preferences, then Behaviour. If ‘Always open in Browser windows’ is checked, Nautilus uses a single window as you navigate. If it’s unchecked, Nautilus operates in Spatial Mode, so each folder opens in a separate window that remembers its size and position.

To search for a file in Nautilus, simply navigate to the folder you want to search, click the Search button (or press Ctrl and F), then type into the search box and hit Enter. Nautilus will perform a case-insensitive search that matches the string of characters you typed if they appear anywhere in the file name. Once the results are displayed, you can modify the search by clicking the plus (+) symbol. You can also save a search for future use, in which case the shortcut will update automatically. To do this, choose ‘Save search’ from the File menu. Nautilus is slow when searching through large folders. You can install a fast desktop search by clicking Applications, then Add/Remove. Search for Beagle and install the Search application that appears in the list.

Links are useful for organising files. For example, you might keep all your photos in sub-folders labelled by month. But you might want quick access to a particular set of photos from a folder you created for a specific project. In fact, you don’t have to copy or move the photos. Instead, you can make a link. Right-click the target folder in Nautilus and select Make Link. Nautilus creates a new virtual folder with a name beginning ‘Link to…’. Drag the link folder to the project folder. You can rename the link folder if you want. Note that if you edit or delete the photos in the link folder, they’ll be modified in the real folder as well, because both folders point to the same place.

Nautilus bookmarks are different from bookmarks in a web browser such as Firefox, although they serve a similar purpose. Ubuntu bookmarks are shortcuts to favourite folders. Once set, a bookmark appears in the Places menu, in the Bookmarks menu in Nautilus and in the quick list of locations in the Open and Save file dialogue boxes. To make a bookmark, open the target folder in Nautilus. Next, select Add Bookmark from the Bookmarks menu or press Ctrl and D – the bookmark will be added immediately. Bookmarks are organised in the Edit Bookmarks dialogue box. Here, you can reorder bookmarks by dragging and dropping.

Emblems in Nautilus are a way of tagging particular items so that they can be picked out in a list easily. Possible uses for emblems are to mark items that require action or identify favourites. The emblem overlays the icon for the file. Nautilus uses emblems to mark links and read-only files. To add an emblem to a file, select the file then right-click, choose Properties and select the Emblems tab. Check the emblem you want and click Close. If the supplied emblems do not meet your needs, you can create new emblems by choosing Edit, then Backgrounds and emblems in Nautilus. Click Add a New Emblem, then click the image to select an image for the new Emblem.

Archives are a way of compressing several files into one large file. Archives are useful for saving disk space, for backup and for emailing or uploading a collection of files easily. In Windows, the most common archive format is zip, but in Linux you’ll often see files with a .tar.gz extension. These are files made into a single file with ‘tar’ (short for tape archive) and ‘gzip’ (GNU Zip). To make an archive in Nautilus, select a folder or collection of files, right-click and choose Create Archive. Check or amend the name of the archive and click Create. If the archive is intended for Windows users, choose the zip format. Double-click an archive to open it in the Archive Manager, where you can view, change and extract the files.