Traditional search-as-you-type on newer Nautilus versions

Solution 1:

Ubuntu 17.10 and later

As the type-ahead search was a Ubuntu-specific patch, it got dropped together with Unity in 17.10. However there is a package called nautilus-typeahead in the Arch repository. Someone took it, compiled for Ubuntu and made a PPA. You can install it by these three commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lubomir-brindza/nautilus-typeahead
sudo apt dist-upgrade
nautilus -r

There is an issue on Launchpad about bringing this behavior back to official Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 14.04 to 17.04

Since the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release type-ahead-find was the default behaviour in Nautilus again.

You can use a dconf key to switch between the different search modes:

• enable type-ahead-find:

  gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences enable-interactive-search true

• disable type-ahead-find in favor of recursive search:

  gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences enable-interactive-search false

Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10

Nautilus 3.6.X cuts many features from the 3.4 and older versions. Canonical decided to keep using nautilus 3.4.2 in Ubuntu 12.10 because if this even though Nautilus 3.6 was already released. I don't think it is possible to get the old search behaviour in 3.6 but what I did was to install the SolusOS patched Nautilus (also works for Ubuntu 13.04) which includes all the features from 3.4.2 (it really is Nautilus 3.4.2) while maintaining the Nautilus 3.6 skin. I've tested this particular package and it works fine in Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04.

Alternatively you could install the Nemo File Explorer which is a fork of Nautilus 3.4 that was made due to the Cinnamon dev team being disappointed with Nautilus 3.6, you can get the install instructions here.

Making it your default file browser is a bit more tricky, this blog post worked for me in Ubuntu 12.10 but some users reported the method not to work properly.

There are alternative methods however. See the following question:

• Make nemo the default file browser

Solution 2:

Ubuntu 18.04 and newer

Well, this issue has motivated me enough to finally check out Ubuntu's PPA submission process; you can find Nautilus packages with the Arch community patch applied here: https://launchpad.net/~lubomir-brindza/+archive/ubuntu/nautilus-typeahead and install it by running:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lubomir-brindza/nautilus-typeahead
sudo apt upgrade
# or, if you don't want to upgrade any other packages:
sudo apt install nautilus

I'd just like to clarify the "Someone took it, compiled for Ubuntu and made a PPA" part in the top post - that's really not how PPA works. The actual way this works is that you provide a patch that adds/changes the desired functionality (typeahed in this case), and add it on top of all the other Ubuntu-specific patches you get when you download the source package using apt-get source nautilus. Once that's done and you've updated the changelog, debuild will create digitally signed files that describe what exactly changed with regards to the upstream source package. Only those are ever uploaded to Launchpad, which then attempts to compile and build the package. The changes to the upstream are reviewable in the Launchpad interface.

TL;DR: one does not upload the complete source code nor binaries directly to Launchpad nor PPA repository. Just wanted to clarify that, in case anyone was wary of something shady happening.

Solution 3:

In Ubuntu Gnome 14.04, open dconf-editor. Go to
org>gnome>nautilus>preferences.

Check the box next to enable-interactive-search. Restart nautilus