Linux – How to force old search behavior in GTK3 file dialog

file managementfirefoxgtklinux

This question pertains very specifically to:

  • THE GTK3 file dialog
  • THAT is used by Firefox on linux
  • WHEN Gnome is installed (but not necessarily used)
  • AND ui.allow_platform_file_picker is set to true in about:config

How do I force that specific variant/version/flavor of the GTK3 file dialog to provide the traditional incremental search UI?

The new "feature" that is being arrogantly forced on me is recursive search that hides the view of the current directory and only displays slowly appearing recursive search results.

The behavior I want is the traditional incremental search where the selection cursor in a normal folder view advances to the first file or directory that matches the name prefix typed so far.

Best Answer

Idealist developers of GTK3 are ruining even the very basic features of the toolkit because they think that changing something from good to worse can be presented as an innovation.

What you can still do is to TAB twice to the file list (press TAB twice right after the file dialog has opened) and start typing. You will have a search dialog in the bottom-right corner displaying what's being typed.

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