Switch from path bar to location bar permanently in Nautilus

As most of you know, you can switch between the visual location entry, and the text based one in Nautilus, by hitting Ctrl+L.

When I tried to set this value permanently in gconf-editor, it doesn't exist. When I tried to do it via the terminal, this is the message that I receive:

No value to set for key: /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry

I can still switch between the two via the Ctrl+L, but I'm stumped about the fix.


If you want to toggle between location bar or path bar without installing anything on your system open a terminal and type to enable the location bar

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences always-use-location-entry  true

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and to disable it

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences always-use-location-entry  false

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This setting is user based. You may need to restart Nautilus with nautilus -q.


The method is applicable for all current releases:

  • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (trusty),
  • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (xenial),
  • Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (bionic),
  • Ubuntu 18.10 (cosmic).

Answer edited out of the question

To permanently switch from path bar to location bar, you can use dconf-tools Install dconf-tools.

To install dconf-tools, run the following command in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

After installing it, search for dconf-tools in the dash and open it.

From there, the setting is located at org -> gnome -> nautilus -> preferences. You need to enable always-use-location-entry to always use the location toolbar instead of the path bar.

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