*** Bug 312273 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Sorry to disappoint you, but that was actually a design decision. It boils down
to how we expect our users to use the desktop, and using a "Load file" dialog to
manage your files is considered to be horribly wrong. I'm closing this bug
report as NOTABUG for now, if you strongly feel against it you can still try to
convince us to add this functionality, but it was really well thought-out :).

Your expectations are not connected to the reality of what users really want,
obviously.

I do not want to _manage_ my file in those dialogs, I just want to have the
option to do the operations quick when I need them.

Not so well thought out.

I'm not sure if this is what users want - it is what we are used to in windows. 

It seems quite confusing that if you click only once a file it will be renamed
for the joe user. 

But as gnome is really geared for simplicity, Calavera's answer makes sense. We
can always move to kde if we want all that windows stuff.

Let's see what the file chooser maintainers have to say to this.

Seems like there's some work going on over in bug 325150.

There has been a discussion on ubuntu forums about this. I am not sure where the devs get what users want, as if you read a little most people seem in favor.

In addition, adding a contextual menu doesn't clutter the user interface since the feature will not be visible to anyone except those who specifically are searching for this feature.

I have selected a few interesting quotes from various people that, I believe, are a very nice summary of why this feature is interesting.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=413457&page=1

For those users that just want to constantly save without making any other changes, then their experience will not be compromised because they won't even see the context menu (as they have no reason to be right-clicking anyway). And even if they did right-click, all they'd see is what they saw if they right-clicked in Nautilus. It's nothing they haven't seen before.

Use Case : Gerard often saves images from the internet. After he creates a directory where he wants to save these images he makes a mistake with naming the directory. Instead of being able to rename the directory in the save dialog, he needs to use Nautilus (or any other file manager) to do it.

If save dialogs should only save, then Gnome should remove the places panel and breadcrumb path and just have one big save button in the middle. Choosing where to save a file is just as much a part of the act of saving as the actual write to disk. If Gnome recognise that a user will want to save files into various different folders at different times (which is why Gnome provides a means by which to change directory) then they are already acknowledging that file management and organisation are part of the save process. If saved files did not need to be organised, then the save folder might as well be hard-coded to a single destination.

I have a large image collection and frequently upload images to various sites via web forms. However, most of my images have numeric filenames (for example, 109475736.jpg), and since GNOME's dialog does NOT have a thumbnail view for files, I have to open Nautilus, find the appropriate file, and THEN locate the file using GNOME's open/save dialog.

There are thousands of times I want to do a simple operation (rename a folder, display hidden files) and I need to close the Save dialog first, make the change and then open the Save dialog again to actually save the file.

When you save a large number of files every day you'll see why you need to be able to do some file management with the save dialog. Think about opening Nautilus that often... A solution for the gnome developers is to disable the context menu by default so that people who need it can enable it.

other use cases here:

Mr. X is saving/opening a file and this might happen
1) he needs to rename an existing file because he wants to save the new file with the same name, but does not want to loose the old file (SAVE ONLY)
2) he sees a file, in the current view, that is no more needed, and he wants to delete it
3) he sees a spelling mistake in a filename/dirname
4) he wants to create a directory to save the new file, but he gives the wrong name to it, and wants to rename it (SAVE ONLY)
5) he sees a file that is not in the correct directory
6) he creates a new directory to rearrange the current dir, because he has lots of files that can be grouped

now if this happens, Mr X has to open nautilus to do all these things. This is in my opinion not acceptable.

The 'file-chooser' component in libgnomeui is solely used for the gnome-vfs filechooser _backend_. The frontend lives in gtk+; and there already exists a bug for this.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 325150 ***