Create folders under "Places"

Solution 1:

As of a long time, the Places list and Recents is hardcoded into Nautilus. There is nothing you can do about it at all.

You could theoretically modify the source code, but that is very problematic. You could theoretically use another file manager (Nemo seems good), but that seems to be your only choice if you do not want to modify source code. Or, you could just use Bookmarks like the rest of us.

If you want to try using the source code, tell me. I will post instructions here for your ease.

Solution 2:

I don't enjoy saying this, but customizing Nautilus is not high on the list of priorities of GNOME devs at the moment. If you're unwilling to modify the source code of Nautilus, I very strongly recommend that you consider installing Nemo. Nemo is everything that Nautilus was, and more.

Installing Nemo is easy: search in the Software Centre (where it's called files) or -

sudo apt-get install nemo

In Nemo, there's only a single combined list for Places and Bookmarks:

Therefore, adding an entry to the Places menu is exactly the same as adding an entry to the Bookmarks. Adobe's answer covers the configuration file, but any other method (CtrlD, dragging-and-dropping, etc.) works just as well.

For example, here's my file:

$ cat .config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks
file:///home/muru/Downloads Downloads
file:///home/muru/Documents
file:///home/muru/Music
file:///home/muru/Pictures
file:///home/muru/Videos
file:///home/muru/Templates
sftp://laptop/home/muru laptop
sftp://mars/muru mars

There's a distinction in the dialog box shown for opening files in most applications:

I think the entries for the home folder, Desktop folder and filesystems are hardcoded. They can't be removed, at any rate (the option is disabled for them, but enabled for the others).

Nemo uses the same icon for a folder in both the sidebar and the main view. It's called an emblem (the icon next to the name):

You can set any image here:

In this case, the icon for the Templates folder is a 1.4MB wallpaper.

Solution 3:

I don't know if it still applies to unity, but once in a while one would make a ~/.gtk-bookmarks file with something like the below to get a custom list of places:

file:///home/boris/bks bks
file:///home/boris/box box
file:///home/boris/dwn dwn
file:///home/boris/cmp cmp
file:///home/boris/pcs pcs
file:///home/boris/msc msc
file:///home/boris/pst pst
file:///home/boris/scl scl
file:///home/boris/trn trn
file:///home/boris/vds vds
file:///home/boris/wrk wrk

Here the first column are places, and the second one are how you want them appear in nautilus.

Edit:

Here it said that the ~/.gtk-bookmarks is replaced with ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks (but the syntax is the same). And here it is said that the list is found at ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs and one also had to add enabled=false in ~/.config/user-dirs.conf.

Solution 4:

The answer by Adobe works for me on Ubuntu 14.04, but it is only for bookmarks

Very simply

Open a terminal and type

gedit ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmark

You will have a file listing like that in Adobe's answer.

Add a line to the file to show what you want.