Back when Gnome 2.6 first came out (some time ago, now), a firestorm broke out over the highly controversial use of spatial file browsing. Ars Technica tried to pass it off by stating:
"It
is difficult to explain the behavior of the
spatial Nautilus
without the reader trying it. Instead, we will go over some of the fundamentals
of using Nautilus in the spatial mode. A spatial file manager is a
significantly different concept from a browser-based file manager that
lets you "browse" between folders on the filesystem in the same window,
so it is important to realize that if you are accustomed to a
browser-based file manager, there may be a learning curve, requiring an
adjustment period before becoming adjusted to the new Nautilus. It took
Jorge about a week to get used to "thinking spatially".
"There are two primary features that facilitate the spatial behavior of Nautilus: window memory and the "one window per folder" paradigm. Window memory will cause a Nautilus window to always open up exactly where you left it the last time, including the position of the scroll bar. When you first start using Nautilus, it doesn't know where you left the window last time, so it places them in seemingly random places. This may be frustrating at first, but once you have placed your windows where you want them, they will always show up there. Another possibly frustrating issue is that since Nautilus imposes the condition that only one window will represent any given folder, when digging into deep directories, your desktop is quickly cluttered with multiple windows. This is alleviated by double-clicking the middle mouse button or holding down the Shift key while clicking on the folder, which opens the child and closes the parent. This use has the same effect in Nautilus as holding down the Option key while double-clicking a folder icon does in the Finder in Mac OS 9 and earlier. Once you have placed a few windows and begin managing your files, it becomes easier. It helps that Nautilus' performance has improved remarkably with this release."
"There are two primary features that facilitate the spatial behavior of Nautilus: window memory and the "one window per folder" paradigm. Window memory will cause a Nautilus window to always open up exactly where you left it the last time, including the position of the scroll bar. When you first start using Nautilus, it doesn't know where you left the window last time, so it places them in seemingly random places. This may be frustrating at first, but once you have placed your windows where you want them, they will always show up there. Another possibly frustrating issue is that since Nautilus imposes the condition that only one window will represent any given folder, when digging into deep directories, your desktop is quickly cluttered with multiple windows. This is alleviated by double-clicking the middle mouse button or holding down the Shift key while clicking on the folder, which opens the child and closes the parent. This use has the same effect in Nautilus as holding down the Option key while double-clicking a folder icon does in the Finder in Mac OS 9 and earlier. Once you have placed a few windows and begin managing your files, it becomes easier. It helps that Nautilus' performance has improved remarkably with this release."
If I wanted to become so retro as to go back to the Windows 3.1x days, where every time I click on a folder I open a new window, I might as well just do away with Linux altogether and re-install Windows 3.11, since that's what this "new" fandangled spatial "feature" brings us back to. "It is difficult to explain the behavior of the spatial Nautilus without the reader trying it."? Um, no it's not — it's horrid.
After a Linux user realizes the power and quickness of auto completion in conjunction with locate, grep, and more or less, using a graphical file browser like nautilus seems like slogging through molasses. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying a wee bit too hard to dumb Linux down a wee bit to much to make it a wee bit too user friendly. In the process, the power and speed of what you are trying to accomplish is lost. 99% of the time, everything can (and should) be done much more quickly at the command prompt. And the once every 3 months that I need to use nautilus to do something specific, I'd rather not have windows popping up all over the place every time I browse through a folder just so that I have the opportunity to click them all shut again. Just my 2¢.
With that brief introduction, turning off the spatial "feature" in nautilus is surprisingly easy — if you know the secret location that the option is buried under when using gconf-editor (which took way too long for me to find the first time I encountered it). But before we can use it, we need to first install the program using yum:
~>
sudo yum install gconf-editor
Press 'y' when
prompted to install the programs and any additional dependencies. After it is installed, source your ~/.tcshrc
file: ~>
source ~/.tcshrc
You are now ready to launch conf-editor: ~> gconf-editor
Next, click on apps -> nautilus
-> preferences, and click that first box under the "always_use_browser"
option. Under the Key
Documentation portion of the screen, you'll suddenly see:Enables the classic
Nautilus behavior, where all windows are browsers.
Nice.
Click on File -> Quit and you're done.