GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 350474
preference to switch middle-double-click spatial behavior with normal.
Last modified: 2011-02-23 21:06:20 UTC
In spatial Nautilus, double-clicking a folder opens it, but leaves the parent open. Double-middle-clicking opens the folder and closes the parent. It would be good if there were a preference in nautilus to switch the two buttons' behaviors, so that people who usually prefer one window at a time could set the normal button for that, rather than struggling to click the wheel all the time. It should be noted that Ubuntu seems to have changed its version of nautilus to behavior that isn't quite either way...they implement a gconf key (no_ubuntu_spatial) for nautilus, and when it is checked, the behavior is identical to stock gnome. When unchecked, both double-left-click and double-middle-click behave the way the double-middle-click does in stock gnome. As this represents a loss of functionality, I find it an undesirable answer...it would be much better if the key simply swapped the functions, rather than eradicating one of them entirely. This could be implemented as a gconf key, which I suppose would be good enough for my own purposes. However, surely a great deal of "normal users" who wouldn't ordinarily muck about with gconf would still prefer to be able to set this behavior, so it seems it would be best if it was available from preferences in nautilus itself.
2 years have passed since this bug was open, and the problem is still there, and kicks me hard. This enhancement would really be welcome for laptop users. As middle click emulation is done by cliking both left and right click button, I could workaround this inconvenience by switching from double to single click policy. However, some new devices (especialy netbooks), to save some space, now put the buttons at each side of the touchpad. Take for example the Acer Aspire One: http://blog.laptopmag.com/wpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/acer-aspire-one_touchpad.jpg This makes middle clicking really hard and annoying. For me, the left and middle click comportments should have been inverted from the start, because it's hard for beginner to click with the left mouse button, and it's even more difficult clicking with the middle mouse button. And GNOME uses DOUBLE-MIDDLE-CLICKING BY DEFAULT for this comportment ! Have a distro-specific patch is not the solution, because some Linux distro prefer to use upstream defaults (which is good). But in this case, I really feel like GNOME defaults are wrong. Without this patch, nautilus, and GNOME are almost unusable for computer beginners, and even for geeks with some specific (but widespread) hardware. We should at least give the choice on this using a gconf key, and at best make it default. Version updated from 2.14 to 2.24.
Lack of resolution on these issues have led Mandriva to revert to browser mode by default in Mandriva Linux 2009.1 :-( Spatial nautilus has been around since GNOME 2.6 and nothing was done to show people that the spatial metaphor is not about opening hundreds of windows to annoy the user... That's quite sad.
This doesn't make sense anymore now that spatial mode is gone. It has been replaced by a hybrid mode that opens new windows with the navigation layout. Also, browser in on by default, so this is overall OBSOLETE.