Nautilus Launcher icon behavior unpredictable with mounted drives

Bug #1198726 reported by Dirk Mcbratney
12
This bug affects 3 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Unity
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Bug Description

Ubuntu 13.04, unity 7.0.0, nautilus 3.6.3.

The behavior of the Unity Launcher in selecting Nautilus windows which are viewing mounted drives is unpredictable. There seem to be two possible expected behaviors:

* Clicking a mounted drive icon in the Unity Launcher creates a new Nautilus window under the Nautilus icon in the Launcher.

* Clicking a mounted drive in the Unity Launcher creates a new Nautilus window but shows an open window under the icon for the requested mounted drive instead, that is, the icon that the user clicked.

Neither of these behaviors is consistently implemented in Unity. All Nautilus windows are represented as triangles on the Nautilus Launcher icon, and minimize animations target the same Nautilus icon. However, clicking the Nautilus icon when it has (1) only one open window and when that window (2) is displaying a location on a mounted drive does not raise the existing instance, but instead launches a new Nautilus instance. If the running Nautilus window is minimized or buried from view on the desktop, it cannot be raised using the Launcher. (Clicking the mounted drive itself from the Launcher does raise the window. However, with no triangle to represent a running app next to the mounted drive icon, there's nothing to indicate to the user that this is the expected behavior.)

The way in which the window was launched has no bearing on the behavior; instead, the current view of the Nautilus window determines whether or not it is treated as a normal Nautilus window by the Unity Launcher. Thus, simply navigating to a mounted drive from within Nautilus makes the window unselectable in the Launcher. Launching a window from a mounted drive icon or by inserting a flash drive, then navigating to Home, does the reverse (the window is treated as an ordinary Nautilus window.)

To further complicate matters, if multiple windows are open and the Nautilus Launcher icon is clicked, all Nautilus windows are displayed in the Compiz Scale "spread windows" effect, including windows "belonging" to the mounted drive icons.

Steps to reproduce:

* With no Nautilus window running, either (1) open a mounted drive from the Launcher, (2) open Nautilus and navigate to a location in a mounted drive, or (3) insert a flash drive and wait for it to automount and launch Nautilus to display the files.

* Click the Nautilus icon, which should show one running instance. A new Nautilus window will be created. This occurs regardless of the focus state of the existing Nautilus window.

If the intended behavior is to treat windows representing mounted drives separately, the Launcher should reflect this behavior. Because the user can navigate to any location within the system from any Nautilus window, determining which icon "owns" the window based on the current view of the window could become confusing, but this could be managed with the right visual cues.

Is this an intended feature in Unity that hasn't been fully implemented, or perhaps a result of upstream work (that is, a different solution to the same problem in Gnome Shell?)

Revision history for this message
Sami Jaktholm (sjakthol) wrote :

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 1170647, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.

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