I believe this is actually a regression in the Nautilus UI, or there is a non-intuitive preference I can not seem to locate.
At one point in earlier Nautilus versions (not sure when, maybe 11.04 or earlier) there was always an "Up Arrow" icon that allowed you to navigate up the directory tree to the parent directory. I can't seem to get this icon back in preferences, and it makes it quite difficult to navigate above the current directory.
I have "Places" in my sidebar, where common directory locations I use can be found, along wit the standard Desktop, Mount Points, etc.
The typical use case is that I start in one of these "Places" and decide I want to go somewhere else in my home directory. If that other location is also not a "Place" then I have to manually punch in a location above the directory I want (if I can't remember it's exact location to tab-complete in the location bar) and navigate down to it. There is no way to use the mouse to move up to the parent directory of a subfolder when you have navigated directly to that subfolder using the Places sidebar.
It is a minor inconvenience, but one I find myself questioning quite frequently. Finally I exhausted all the preferences and menus looking for how to turn this back on. To my surprise, there didn't seem to be an option.
As a more detailed use case, today I had two tabs open in Nautilus, and was executing a "Dropbox Cleanup" where I move stuff out of my over-used-cluttered dropbox folder into more permanent and organized locations. This is one of my few GUI file manager activities, as I find myself using command line with tab completion and wildcards when I am doing most file operations. In the Nautilus UI, not being able to move around the directory structure and execute cut/copy/paste operations entirely with my mouse seems counter-intuitive to the design goals of a graphical file manager. Of course I can switch to the "tree" sidebar that does give access to the whole directory tree with a mouse, but I prefer the "Places" sidebar, which I believe is the default interface.
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: nautilus 1:3.4.0-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-22.35-generic 3.2.14
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-22-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Apr 11 11:38:11 2012
GsettingsChanges:
org.gnome.nautilus.window-state geometry '754x800+65+221'
org.gnome.nautilus.window-state maximized true
org.gnome.nautilus.window-state sidebar-width 253
org.gnome.nautilus.window-state start-with-status-bar true
ProcEnviron:
TERM=xterm
PATH=(custom, no user)
LANG=en_US.utf8
SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nautilus
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2012-03-13 (28 days ago)
Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at https:/