GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 685819
Pressing backspace in Nautilus no longer navigates up one directory level.
Last modified: 2012-10-26 00:16:40 UTC
In nautilus-3.6.0, pressing backspace in an open nautilus window no longer brings you up a directory level; instead it does nothing. This used to work in 3.4.x. My quick guess is that this is somehow related to the new search interface (which appears to capture all keyboard input, even when not manually opened).
Confirmed with Files 3.6.0 on Open-Suse 12.2 and Ubuntu 12.10 (yes, for both OS's there are repositories that provide the new Files). (I'd love to but can't set the status to confirmed. [I have no idea why I lack those permissions.]) Also, this is really annoying. I haven't yet found another shortcut for the function, either.
To avoid confusion with just-type search, the keybinding is Alt-Up in 3.6. See bug 680208 and 679822 - closing as a duplicate of the latter. We don't want to reintroduce backspace as a keybinding for now. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 679822 ***
Sorry to be a pest, but I don't really get the rationale for not re-enabling backspace: * Normally, the search bar isn't open → it doesn't make sense to try to delete a letter from the input → backspace for "go up one level" doesn't hurt * When the search input is there (focused or not), however, it should receive backspace key presses. (Btw... i just noticed a whole slew of other bugs while looking at this... no tooltips in the toolbar; gnome-sushi interferes with just-type (pressing space triggers it when the search bar isn't focused – that's inconsistent with pressing letters or numbers); only one tab at a time can have a search bar; the search bar only closes on Esc when it is focused; the search icon changes state when switching from a tab with an open search to one without and back. I'm a bit unsure if I want to research whether all that's reported already. In any case, thanks for all the fine work in Nautilus, it really has made progress compared to 3.4.)
The problem is having the same key do two very different operations according to whether we're in a search mode, we wanted to avoid that. Some of those bugs are fixed already in 3.6.1 or git, some have reports open, some might be genuine bugs. Are you using 3.6.1? 1. "gnome-sushi interferes with just-type (pressing space triggers it when the search bar isn't focused – that's inconsistent with pressing letters or numbers);" - I'm not sure this is a bug, previewing search results makes a lot of sense to me. 2. "only one tab at a time can have a search bar" - I don't think I can reproduce this. What do you mean exactly? 3. "the search icon changes state when switching from a tab with an open search to one without and back" - I believe this is fixed in git master and gnome-3-6 branches 4. "the search bar only closes on Esc when it is focused" - bug 685120 Feel free to open a more detailed bug report for 2.
Thank you very much for all the info, Cosimo! So, I was using 3.6.0 (Open-Suse) but I've tried 3.6.1 (Ubuntu) in between and am now using a self-built 3.7.1 version. 1. Still the same (resolution might be hard to find though, because as you mention, sushi is useful): bug 686902 2. Still happened in 3.6.1, but is fixed in 3.7.1. Yay! 3. Fixed in 3.7.1, you are correct! 4. Will CC. 5. Still no tooltips in the toolbar: bug 686903