The “Break it Down” Blog

For GNOME fans out there that love the UI polish but are less than happy about the lack of tabbed browser in the file manager and sometimes obsessive use of the “spatial” paradigm, rejoice!

It looks like GNOME developer Christian Neumair has been working on adding tabbed browsing to Nautilus (the GNOME file manager); which ended up being a harrier job than most thought, requiring significant changes to Nautilus.

While the work has come a long way and is nearing completion, Christian is asking for help with the finishing touches to make sure that the already relatively polished implementation isn’t missing any critical pieces, look or feel to it.

Right now it seems you need to check out the multiview branch and build them to see them in action.

For the non-developers that just want to “try it out”, you shouldn’t have to wait too long. It is expected that this new feature will ship in GNOME 2.24 in September.

Awesomely-enough it seems that Christian also merged in Column View support into Nautilus which will be available in 2.24 as well along with a slew of GVFS optimizations and enhancements to further improve the new virtual file system support.

Christian commented on Column View not being quite ready for prime-time, but with some bug reports and user help I’m sure it will be there in September.

This guy is my hero.

Thanks Ars!