GNOME’s Nautilus file manager is finally matching the behavior of other file managers like KDE’s Dolphin and Xfce’s Thunar with a keyboard shortcut for copying and pasting files.
This Week in GNOME highlighted a notable albeit one could argue long overdue change for GNOME Files / Nautilus: Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert support for copying and pasting files.
i use CTRL C and CTRL V … What am I missing here?
Nothing if that works for you, but sometimes I end up using Ctrl+Insert / Shift+Insert a lot because I am doing a lot of things in the terminal and Ctrl+C has a different meaning there, so it is nice for Ctrl+Insert / Shift+Insert to work everywhere for when I have it in my muscle memory.
I’m guessing it’s for those godforsaken left-handed mousers.
Wait wait wait. Are you saying/implying that there has been a better way to copy paste for lefties with using ctrl/shift insert all this time? I waste so much time with shifting my left hand from the Mouse!
Essentially nothing. They copied the shortcuts from Thunar and Dolphin for copy paste.
I’m a gnome guy but always swap to Thunar on a fresh install.
What’s better with Thunar?
It’s probably just that I got used to it with XFCE at some point. My main two concerns:
Otherwise, I find Nautilus much more aesthetically pleasing.
Agree that Nautilus is the most beautiful/clean, but almost the least functional. Maybe those two are in fact inversely proportional, eh.
I haven’t used Nautilus in ages, so I can’t say for certain, but Thunar is a more traditional-feeling file manager. It feels more like an older version of the Windows file manager but with tabs, while Nautilus seems more Mac-like.
Can Thunar run under Wayland or nah? (Just curious, I don’t want to actually use it.)
Everything runs under Wayland. That should be your default expectation.
At this point, Wayland is the preferred environment for GTK and Qt apps. Unless the app is exploiting some specific aspect of X11, all GTK (3 and up) and Qt (5 and up) apps work fine under Wayland.
As for other toolkits, FLTK, Electron, and SDL apps run in Wayland too.
And by “preferred”, I mean that these apps (like Thunar) will run natively on Wayland even if Xwayland is available.
There are Wayland only toolkits now but not really any “modern” toolkits that do not support Wayland. When Thunar gets ported to GTK5, it will be Wayland only.
Obviously ancient x11 specific stuff like XCB or Athena, and things built on them like Motif will require Xwayland or Xsatellite. So if you want to run, xv or motif nedit, you need those. This list includes GTK2 as well. But even they work well enough you may not notice. I mean, xeyes won’t track your mouse I guess.
And just in case mentioning xeyes brings out the Wayland critics, you can build an xeyes app that works in Wayland. I think the Wayland Maker compositor project has one for example (WindowMaker in Wayland).