Ctrl-L on desktop puts location on the top of the screen (when using no toolbars)

[Mark Wilkinson]

When using Unity, clicking on the desktop to give it the keyboard focus and then pressing Ctrl-L causes a location bar to appear behind (and partly obscured by) the Unity panel, and the icons on the desktop shuffle down slightly. In previous versions using Gnome 2 this shortcut would bring up a dialogue box in which you could type the path name of a folder to open, which was very handy. The functionality still works, but the presentation is obviously incorrect.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: nautilus 1:3.2.1-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Nov 1 21:11:40 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nautilus
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-22 (10 days ago)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, I can't confirm there nothing happens on ctrl-L

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

could you take a screenshot showing the issue?

[Mark Wilkinson (mhw)]

Ok, here's a screenshot of what I see when I press Ctrl-L on my login.

I've tried reproducing while using the guest session, but it doesn't seem to have the same problem. This suggests it could be something to do with the settings that I have accumulated from previous versions of nautilus, but I'm unsure what setting turns this behaviour on.

[Mark Wilkinson (mhw)]

Ah, worked it out. Open a normal nautilus window and choose View > Main Toolbar to remove the toolbar from nautilus windows. Click on the desktop and press Ctrl-L and the location field appears at the top of the desktop, behind the Unity panel.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Confirmed on Oneiric, it also happens with an upstream build without distro patch so seems to be a GNOME bug

[Mark Wilkinson (mhw)]

Hmm; it may be a bug that's present in the upstream version, but I can't seem to reproduce it on Oneiric when logged in to a guest GNOME session (i.e. one using gnome-shell). It may be that there's some behaviour that blocks Ctrl-L when nautilus is running under gnome-shell that isn't working under Unity.

That said, the functionality of being able to open an arbitrary folder is quite handy so it'd be a loss to lose it completely.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Do you get nautilus to handle the desktop under gnome-shell? They don't do it upstream by default, are you sure that it doesn't do it but got hidden behind the gnome-shell panel bar?

Here on a gnome-panel session it displays the bar next to the gnome-panel bar and shifts the wallpaper, that's no "under the bar" like in unity but still seems buggy compared to the small box dialog it opened before GNOME3

[Mark Wilkinson (mhw)]

Nautilus handling the desktop under gnome-shell seems to be the default for the guest session, according to gnome-tweak-tool and observed behaviour. For example, right clicking on the desktop allows you to create new folders and documents. The Ctrl-L bar is definitely not appearing: there's nothing taking input focus so typing '/tmp<Return>' doesn't open a file browser, and the wallpaper doesn't shift as you've observed it does when the Ctrl-L bar does appear.

I don't have gnome-panel installed at the moment so can't compare the behaviour there.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The bug is old and Ubuntu changed quite a lot since, there has also been no activity here nor similar reports. Closing since we believe the issue as described is deprecated but feel free to file a new report if you still have problems in recent Ubuntu versions.