A final major feature has been added to the file manager

Feb 25, 2016 09:46 GMT  ·  By

Nautilus developers have pushed a final major update for the 3.20 branch of the application, and they are preparing for the launch of the stable version.

Nautilus or Files is the file manager for the GNOME stack and it's an important component. It's one of the most used packages, so any kind of modification will be immediately spotted by the users. Since the application is still pretty far from perfect, it has been improved in the past few months.

Many of the GNOME users out there are still not happy with the direction of the GNOME project, and Nautilus is one of the targets for the complaints. Truth be told, Nautilus has advanced considerably since the switch to the 3.x branch. That meant that some features have been removed or modified, and this is the main contention point of the people who don't want to see Nautilus changing.

One of the guidelines for Linux development is pretty simple, don't change something that works. This might sound like the correct thing to do, but it's also something that prevents progress. That's why many applications in the Linux world seem trapped in the past, with old GUIs and functions.

A new zoom level for Nautilus

A new feature has been added to Nautilus, and that is a new zoom level for the file manager. It's not a trivial feature since it looks like people have been using the high levels of zoom already.

"We added a new zoom level to nautilus, now you will have available 48px, 64px, 96px and 128px. This was hard to do because of how the canvas of nautilus behaves, which multiplies the padding according to the zoom level. So we cannot control the padding, making the view unusable on zoom levels farther than the range 64px – 128px," developers have explained.

They’ve also said that the Nautilus canvas needs some work, but that will have to be done in the next development cycle. The stable version of GNOME 3.20 is expected to land on March 23.