Comment 2 for bug 783228

I just went looking for this bug report on Launchpad after seeing a question on Ask Ubuntu from someone asking what the right keyboard-based way was in Unity to open a file. (He mentioned being able to hit Alt+F2 and enter the path to a file to open it in classic gnome.) I checked to see what happened, and noticed that the behaviour is a bit odd: hit Alt+F2, then type /home/, and you'll see all the user folders in /home. Type /home/user/ and you'll see all the files and folders in your home directory. You can continue to Documents (for example) and subfolders. However, typing a full path and hitting enter does nothing. Strangely enough, once you get to the folder you want, the files will be displayed below the search bar, and you can click on the one you want. This should really open the file, but it doesn't.

If you tap the Super key instead of Alt+F2, you can select files, but as soon as you start entering a full path, no files show up. (Super + typing /home shows me about half a dozen files, chosen seemingly at random, but these disappear as soon as I continue typing the path.) In my case the file search dialogue fails to find the majority of my files, but that's a different issue.