Nautilus doesn't have type-ahead search in Ubuntu 17.10 [duplicate]
I've just upgraded to Ubuntu 17.10 and have noticed that Nautilus (I'm aware they dropped it years ago, I meant that Ubuntu patched it back in before) dropped type-ahead. It now instead opens the search which is way slower for me and searches instead of selecting the matching file. It's very hard to use it for me because of this.
Is there a way to bring it back, downgrade Nautilus, or is there an alternative?
Solution 1:
As pointed out here, type-ahead find has been removed in favour of full text search.
However, it is possible to make full text search behave more like type-ahead find. Simply open the Nautilus Preferences, click the Search and Preview tab, and make the following adjustments under the "Search" heading:
- Search in subfolders: Never
- Full text search: do not set as default
Now typing letters in Nautilus will only search files by their names, not by their contents, and only for files in the current directory, not subdirectories. Unfortunately, this also affects the results you see when you do a Ctrl+F search.
I would just like to add my voice to the many who think that disabling type-ahead find was a mistake, and the fact that it is not even available as an optional feature is an incomprehensibly poor decision on the part of the Nautilus developers, especially given that full text search was always available via Ctrl+F for those that wanted it. I hope Ubuntu switch back to using a patched version of Nautilus for 18.04.
Solution 2:
As others have said, type-ahead find seems to have been irrevocably removed from nautilus, however there are many alternative file managers with a very similar look & feel (and sharing marine theme) available in the standard repositories, all of whom come with type-ahead find by default:
- nemo - A fork of nautilus 3.4, brings back type-ahead find and F3 split view, and probably some other removed features I didn't even know existed.
- caja - A fork of nautilus 2.6
- thunar - The xfce default file manager, my personal favorite because it is noticably faster than the alternatives even on my high-powered work laptop
- dolphin - Familiar to anyone who used KDE