Fixed columns' width in Nautilus

In Ubuntu 11.10 the nautilus version has a new feature, as you can see: it adapts the column's width to the content of the column itself (at least for the Name column).

This behavior is not always desirable, so I am looking for a way to disable it.

Before Ubuntu 12.10

As this seems to be hard-coded into Nautilus, your best bet be to report a bug, as there is no solution short of patching Nautilus. Even with the newer versions of Nautilus that use dconf, there is no option to change this setting:

Ubuntu 12.10 and up

In Ubuntu 12.10 (so far) it seems Nautilus no longer has this problem. If the final version comes with the standard Nautilus 3.6, you will be able to change the column width freely.

As Roland Taylor said, the way Nautilus handles columns is at present not easily tweakable without writing some additional code and patching the application, which would not be trivial to do because of the way column handling is built in to Nautilus. There really is no way to do it in Nautilus by altering any configuration settings.

However, I was encouraged by con-f-use to give an answer relating to Thunar, the lightweight Xfce file manager. In Thunar it is very easy to set the widths of the columns in list view and they stay fixed until you feel the need to alter them. All you need to do is go to view > configure columns and uncheck the setting to 'automatically expand columns as needed'.

The screenshot displays the column setting and behind it you can see the adjusted columns in list view- any changes made to them are saved when exiting Thunar, unlike in Nautilus.

Future versions of Nautilus will probably adopt this feature (Ronald Taylor points out that it may be available in Nautilus 3.6 in Ubuntu 12.10), but for now this Thunar solution is unfortunately the only solution for people who want fixed columns.