GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 144919
Spatial Nautilus doesn't remember folder view when opening a symlink
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
I've made symlinks to a couple of my most used folders on my desktop. When I double-click on them, the window does not look similar (position, background, ...) to the window which opens when I open the folder directly from its original location. Steps to reproduce the problem: 1. Create a folder "test" in your home directory. Open it with nautilus and assign a position and a background to the window. 2. Create a symlink to this directory on your Desktop (ln -s ~/test ~/Desktop/test). 3. Double click on the folder "test" on your Desktop. Actual Results: The folder doesn't open on the location which you assigned to the original folder. How often does this happen? Every time.
I think the actual problem is that Nautilus doesn't actually follow (or know about) symbolic links. In the example above, if you open "test" by double-clicking on the link on the desktop, then the window that is open is /home/me/Desktop/test, not /home/me/test. This violates the first rule of spatial ("Coherency: there is a direct, one-to-one relationship between folders and windows"). Some symptoms of this: - If you want to see where a (folder) link points, you can't open it and click the popup in the corner, because it'll only show you where the link is, not where it points. - As mentioned above, ruins the whole spatial metaphor, since ~/test and ~/Desktop/test are thought to be different folders, and so they have different sizes/positions. You can even do crazy things like drag a file from ~/test to ~/Desktop/test -- it'll ask you if you want to replace it with itself. - If you go up (alt-up-arrow) from this folder, you get the folder that the symlink lives in, not where the target lives. This is probably not what you want. (Especially for links on the desktop, because then you have a window showing you what's already there on your desktop.) - Making a new symlink inside that folder is flakey -- it depends on the original symlink not being moved or deleted. Suppose there's a folder "Important stuff" inside ~/test. Now double-click the "test" link on the desktop, right-click "Important stuff" and Make Link, drag the new link to the desktop, and delete the first ("test") link. The new link points to ~/Desktop/test/Important Stuff, not ~/test/Important Stuff, so it mysteriously doesn't work. FWIW, the Mac doesn't behave like this. If you make a link (they call them aliases) from A -> B, and you double-click A, the folder B opens. So things like aliases-to-things-inside-aliases work fine. (This really threw me for a loop when I tried to use spatial Nautilus at first.)
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 135118 ***