Comment 25 for bug 508632

The issue with Ctrl-L is that *it is not a toggle*. Once you enter text mode, you cannot press Ctrl-L again to move back to button mode. Yes, this was a very useful feature: enter text mode to navigate to some distant path, then go back to buttons when you reach that. A common use case:

1. say you are in ~/Desktop and wish to go to /etc/apt. With buttons, this is 3 cilcks (go up to root) and 2 double clicks (etc and apt). With text mode, it's one click (toggle text mode) and 8 letters (/etc/apt).
2. once you reach /etc/apt, say you wish to navigate forward and backward in directories that are close togethere (say, under /etc). Button mode is superior here, because it acts as a visual, short-term history (it shows the last few locations you visited under your current path, which is very useful when e.g. copying files or looking for something specific).

This was yet another regular part of my daily workflow, now removed. Way to go, I guess.

(
Troll mode on: Alt-F4 closes the window, plus we have a menu entry for Close. Why triplicate the functionality with a close button? It's superfluous.
Troll mode off: in some cases, duplication is significantly more efficient. Removing the toggle button effectively removes any hint of this feature's existence from the majority of Gnome's user base.
)

Do note that Windows Vista/7 has a more efficient implementation of this very feature: the address bar doubles up as a button bar (default mode) and a text bar (when clicked on the left or right). No button, similar functionality. In fact, this was one of the major improvements over the older, text-only address bar on Windows XP.