14 DAY TRIAL // While the upcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop environment is in development for the past four months, one of its most essential components, the Nautilus file manager, hasn't received a development release until now.
As part of a new major release of the GNOME desktop environment, most of its core components and apps are getting new features and improvements, and Files a.k.a. Nautilus is one of the most important components of GNOME as it allows users to manage their files and folders of the operating system where GNOME is installed.
With the upcoming GNOME 3.30 release, the Nautilus file manager is getting a bunch of new features and improvements that have recently been revealed as part of the beta version that landed this week in the project's download servers for early adopters and public beta testers ahead of next week's GNOME 3.30 Beta release.
Here's what's coming to Nautilus as part of GNOME 3.30
In GNOME 3.30, which is hitting the streets on September 5, 2018, the Nautilus file manager is getting a much-improved Flatpak experience for both users and developers, a search engine for finding recent files, support for deleting the Desktop directory, support for right-clicking expanders, and better handling for the impaired.
Furthermore, Nautilus 3.30 will get touch support for menus in views, a new "Show Recency" column in the Recent view, support for background actions in the path bar, a new path bar/search design, a new toolbar menus design, as well as the ability to expose active windows for the Ubuntu Dash.
Nautilus 3.30 also promises to improve visuals in new views, the triggering of maximum file names when renaming, as well as of file count and wrong labels during operations progress, offer extra information in the Properties dialog and display an "Open With" action for the files located in the Trash folder.
It will also warn users when a renamed file is hidden once it was renamed, improve file access via x-nautilus-search, distribute icons horizontally in the icon view, make it easier to open the GNOME Disks utility via a new button in the Properties dialog, and allow users to open search filters with an open popover when using Ctrl+F.
Nautilus 3.30 beta is now available for public testing if you want to experience the new features and improvements mentioned above, but you'll have to compile it on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution to use it. Meanwhile, the development team is getting ready to port Nautilus to the upcoming GTK+ 4 technologies.