How to reduce the spacing between icons in nautilus?

Ok thanks to your message I found a solution which works for me in nautilus 3.x. In dconf-editor, modify thumbnail-size, located in org->gnome->nautilus->icon-view

I set it to 128 and it is now exactly like the "make it more compact" option I used to love in nautilus/gnome 2.x!

I don't know if this is what you were looking for, but for me there is almost no space left between my icons and using my favorite thumbnailer program; "cover thumbnailer". It is simply ace!

Cheese, thanks for the idea of using a gnome editor!

Looking at possible configurations with gconf-editor, I'm afraid it is not possible without changing the source code and recompiling Nautilus.

This option (Compact Layout) was removed from Nautilus (like many other useful features). To get this feature (and many others) back, you might want to have a look at Nemo: http://www.webupd8.org/2013/10/install-nemo-with-unity-patches-and.html

It's basically Nautilus (to be precise, a fork of v3.4) with all the great features that were present in previous versions and the improvements from the current version, plus some nice extras you won't find in any Nautilus version.

In Nemo, the option is in the right-click menu of any folder (Arrange Items > Compact Layout). If you want to set it as default for all folders, you can set it in the preferences.