Is there a way to restore Nautilus' split screen (F3) feature?

I am using Ubuntu 13.04 since today and I am missing the split screen function in Nautilus. Is there any way to patch Nautilus so that this amazing function is usable again?

Solution 1:

Among other features that were unfortunately removed in Nautilus 3.6 (used by Ubuntu 13.04 by default) was the extra pane/split screen, invoked using F3. It was removed because the GNOME developers thought it didn't work well on touch screens and that placing one Nautilus to one side of the screen with another to the opposite side fulfilled the same purpose. It doesn't, but I'm not a developer! Links to the bug and the commit.

One way to get the feature back is to install a patched version of the older Nautilus 3.4. The easiest way to do so is to add a PPA managed by the good people at webupd8.org. Unfortunately this patch version is only available for Ubuntu 12.04 and the now-unsupported 12.10 and 13.04 releases.

Run these commands in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/experiments
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
killall nautilus

N.B.: The instructions contain a warning, namely that if the dist-upgrade command attempts to remove packages, there is a problem and you should not continue. Otherwise things should be fine.

For Ubuntu 14.04 you'll need to patch Nautilus manually. This answer can get you started, but unfortunately I can't find what to patch exactly.

The simplest option is to change file managers. Nemo is quite similar to what Nautilus used to be. Yet Another User mentions below that it is in the repositories, but this webupd8.org PPA will install the newest version:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/nemo
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nemo nemo-fileroller

Solution 2:

There are two workarounds I've found to approximate this feature.

• Using the tiling features in Unity:

  • Open Nautilus.
  • Hit Super-Ctrl-Left Arrow to tile the window to the left edge of the screen.
  • Hit Ctrl-N to open a new window and navigate to the target directory.
  • Hit Super-Ctrl-Right Arrow to tile the window to the right edge of the screen.
  • Drag and drop your files back and forth.

• You can also select the folder you want to "split" into and do a Ctrl-T to open a new tab. Then either drop files into the tab or tear off the tab into a new window.