GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 696318
Entries from "Places" should not appear in "Bookmarks" dialog
Last modified: 2017-09-04 10:34:13 UTC
Since there is no option to manage (even sort) those entries, there is no reason for them to be there. It is only confusing, because "Places" and "Bookmarks" are being displayed separately in the Panel.
The only point of having places in the Bookmarks dialog is that the user can rename them: instead of Music you can have "My Rockin TuneZ". But I'm not sure how useful that is. I think I'd be okay with them going away.
Renaming can be done directly on the folder itself. Sidebar will not update name immediately, but hitting F9 twice works around that.
Renaming the place in Bookmarks is not the same as renaming the folder, by the way. You can rename the place to FunPictures (which will show up in the sidebar) even if the folder is still called Pictures. If we think that distinction is useful, we should keep places in the Bookmarks dialog. If not, they should go away.
Actually, you can also rename places by right clicking them in the sidebar and choosing Rename. So the user will still be able to do that even if we remove them from the Bookmarks dialog.
Few days ago I noticed that some dialogs (I use Cinnamon now) use those bookmarks. So I had to add them back. May be that was the reason for them to be there.
An interesting finding: in the Bookmarks dialog, if you change the path of one of these "special bookmarks", they are not special anymore and can be removed. However, this will not remove them from nautilus sidebar. What happens is that they are removed from ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks, but Nautilus always shows them in the sidebar anyway, so it doesn't matter whether they are found in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks or not. (Instead, XDG user directories are configured in ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs.) Removing them from ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks will remove them from the gtk file chooser dialog. But this is not the case in 3.9, because the file chooser has a new sidebar, based on nautilus sidebar, so where built-in user dirs are always shown regardless of the content of ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks. Conclusion: it seems to me that the easy fix for this bug would be for the default content of ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks not to contain the XDG user dirs. I found that xdg-user-dirs-gtk is responsible for this, but there is no bugzilla component for it.
*** Bug 722252 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The "Bookmarks Editor" dialog was removed, making this bug obsolete. (A better way to edit the sidebar is being considered instead ─ bug 771919)