GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 48403
Multiple selection in icon view is broken
Last modified: 2006-12-26 18:29:34 UTC
Selecting multiple items by navigating with only the keyboard seems to be currently impossible in Nautilus. This is a feature I miss from the Windows Explorer and other file managers. It works as follows on Windows (ivon view, but the same concept applies to list view): Make one item selected some way. Then press the shift key and keep it pressed. If you then, as an example, press the left arrow key the item to the left of the originally selected item will also get selected. If you press left again another item to the left of the last one will get selected, making a total of three selected items. If you then press down, the three items immediately below the first ones will also get selected, producing a 3×2 area of selected items. This way you can select files in rectangular patterns by navigating with the arrow keys and pressing shift. ------- Bug moved to this database by unknown@bugzilla.gnome.org 2001-09-09 21:18 ------- The original owner (arlo@workthatmouse.com) of this bug does not have an account here. Reassigning to the default owner of the component, nautilus-maint@bugzilla.gnome.org.
Raising severity to normal as this is a fairly major keynav issue.
should probably use shift + arrow keys to make the selections
Multiple selection is possible, just not very intuitive. You move the focus around using Ctrl+arrowkeys, and hit space to add the currently-focused item to the selection. If this has stopped working it's an accessibility stopper.
Calum what you have describe works. Correct me if im wrong, but in windows i think they have the same ctrl mechanism nautilus has where you can do multiple selections of individual items with the mouse, but also use shift plus the arrow keys to do the equivalen of rubberdanding blocks of icons. This is how the list view works as well. Louie this is pretty basic and expected fuctionality of a file manager so i'm going to raise the priority to high, but if you disagree please adjust as needed.
s/mouse/keyboard....also need to learn to type eventually :)
Dave you're right, the Windows selection method is subtly different in some ways, and works better overall IMHO-- in Nautilus (and when using the GtkTreeView, which essentially has the same selection model), I find it much easier to lose my current selection by accident while trying to extend it, whether using the mouse or the keyboard. But that's kind of an aside-- the issue here is whether you should be able to do contiguous selections in Nautilus icon view using Shift+arrowkeys, and I agree that you should.
*** Bug 89734 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Re-titling, as multiple selection doesn't work as it should with the mouse either (you can't do range selections by Shift+clicking).
setting priority to high in hope that this bug gets some love
Updating status_whiteboard field to reflect A11Y team's assessment of accessibility impact.
*** Bug 93176 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 106271 ***
D'oh bollocks, typed in the wrong field... this is NOT a duplicate of #106271.
This should have been confirmed, guys :-)
Apologies for spam... marking as GNOMEVER2.3 so it appears on the official GNOME bug list :)
Fixed in cvs.
Mass reassigning bugs with 2.2.0 milestone to 2.2.x milestone Grep for "Mass reassigning" to filter out this bug spam.