Nautilus Places list is inconsistent

[Dylan McCall]

Binary package hint: nautilus

Nautilus' Places list contains two distinct sections: The one on the top, which the user cannot edit, and the one of the bottom, which the user can edit.

The bottom ones are bookmarks, created by the user to link to files. They can be freely added and removed. The top ones are built in, listing mounted file systems, the user's home folder, Desktop and Documents.

It is those last two that I am particularly bothered by. It makes sense that the bookmarks for mounted file systems would not be editable, but why are those not controlled by the user?
For example, a user may not want his Documents folder linked to in the Places list, but unless he changes its name, it will be. He has no control over this.

Whether or not to bookmark the Documents or Desktop folders should be entirely in the user's hands, where those menu entries are created in the user-editable section of the Places list. Nautilus could still create those bookmarks automatically, but the user should be able to remove or rename them, since they are linking to writable files in that user's space.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

The user can control the bookmarks. Just open any directory with Nautilus and in the menu select Bookmarks -> Add/Edit Bookmarks.

[Dylan McCall (dylanmccall)]

Krychek, that does not solve the problem. The issue I am discussing is the Places which /can not/ be edited, and how they correspond with the user-created bookmarks.

There are currently three Places lists, each with a different selection of built-in Places that could not be easily edited by the user, and user-created bookmarks which are stored in the same central location. People thus create bookmarks to link to locations not linked to by the built in places. The problem arises here, because while those bookmarks may be fine in one list, they are redundant in another. Most notably, this commonly caused a redundancy problem in the main menu's Places list, which ultimately led to Bug #122602.

Nautilus should automatically list mounted file systems in Places, and maybe special locations like network://. However, specific locations like Desktop should always be saved with user-defined bookmarks.
To fix the obvious loss here (it's good having Desktop and File System linked to in Places out of the box), there can be some user-controllable bookmarks set by default. Specifically: Desktop, / and Home. (Possibly the automatically created home subfolders, too, such as Documents, Downloads and Public).

The ultimate goal here would be that every places list, be it the one in the GTKFileChooser widget, the main menu or Nautilus, has the exact same items. They already show the exact same bookmarks, so integrating that automatically generated chunk of the menu should not be too difficult. Just takes some imagination.
One thought would be a file that lists every item that should be in the Places menu. Then, every time a program wants a Places menu, it reads from that file instead of duplicating code.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. Upstream has plan about making a xml described structure which would be easy to edit. The bug might also be a duplicate in the Ubuntu bug tracker

[David Hart (dhart)]

I've been searching in vain for all the the places where non-user-editable 'Places menu' items are defined (i.e. Home, Desktop, Computer, Floppy, Network, Connect to Server, etc.). Can someone please post a quite list of file paths? (these are nautilus UI XML files or .desktop files?)

[Kaivalagi (m-buck)]

Also, the bookmarked places items get moved intoa sub-folder when they reach a count of 5, this is hard-coded in the code.

Can I suggest that for the short term the limit of items is set in gconf so it can be modified by editing a value via gconf-editor. Long term an automatic move of items to a sub-folder could happen if this same value is set to -1 when the menu gets too large to not scroll.

[c49 (c49)]

I agree to Kaivalagi. It is annoying when places are moved to subfolder while there is still a lot of space for much more bookmarks. value in gconf would be fine,