Petition to bring back file name copy/paste functionality in GTK file chooser

[Qianqian Fang]

For a very long time, I've never/rarely needed to hand-type file paths/names - it is extremely slow, error-proning and requiring a lot more work (reading/clicking/moving cursors) to do this simple task.

Instead, I use tabs in a terminal to navigate, pwd to print, and copy/paste to another file browser or window to use the full path. In many file browsers (like Thunar), I could also single click on the file, and directly paste it to the address bar and it directly gives the full file name.

But this becomes increasingly difficult to do on the GTK file chooser rolled out sometimes ago. The file chooser window first removed the file path address bar, but at least there was a button I can click to show it to copy/paste. Then, even that button disappeared - after many frustrating hours, the only way to show the address bar is "Ctrl+L", after reading many similarly frustrated posts

https://www.google.com/search?q=unable+to+type+path+dialog+ubuntu
https://www.google.com/search?q=unable+to+type+path+dialog+site%3Aaskubuntu.com&oq=unable+to+type+path+dialog+site
https://www.google.com/search?q=can+not+type+path+in+file+selector+linux+site:askubuntu.com

From the long lists of complains that one can find online (I could easily find more), I think this just prove that removing/hiding the address bar is very counter intuitive and should be reverted.

I see where this came from - to mimic Mac OS, like most GNOME style/appearance was trying to achieve, and this setting maybe cleaner and easier to attract less experienced users, but for people use Linux for work day-in-and-day-out, this is highly annoying and counter productive.

Here I would like to petition to revert the change and bring back the address bar in the file chooser dialog (which is shared among not just GNOME, but other GTK based desktops, such as xfce), or at least bring back the button option.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, the right place to do those changes is upstream though, could you report it to them on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues ?

[Qianqian Fang (fangq)]

thanks, submitted to the upstream

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/2443

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thanks!

[Qianqian Fang (fangq)]

feel free to link my previous complaint to this thread (I almost forgot I opened the other ticket over a yr ago)

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+3.0/+bug/1807759