Ubuntu – How to move Nautilus’ navigation buttons to the left

11.10nautilus

Can the "navigation buttons" (forward and back) in nautilus 3 be moved to the left? I just find them impractical and confusing on the right. This is nautilus looks by default:

enter image description here

I would like to move the forward and back buttons to the left of the "location bar". The search button could be left there. Is it possible?

Edit: I posted this as as a bug to the Gnome developers. If you also feel the toolbar should be customizable, suscribe to the bug report in the following link:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664311

Best Answer

enter image description here

nyteryder79 figured it out and posted his instructions in this forum thread:

It's really easy to do, and I've got the easy Terminal instructions below. BTW, the version of Nautilus current as of this post is 3.2.1. You will probably need to do this any time Nautilus gets updated through Update Manager. The exact line number of the code that needs to change may vary as well. If this is the case, just use find as I instruct below.

Warning: I am not a professional and am not responsible for anything going wrong. These instructions are simply a guide for how I personally managed to fix this annoyance. Use at your own risk.

First off, you may need to enable the "Source code" repository. To do this in Ubuntu, press the Super/Windows key and type "Source". Open the "Software Sources" application from the results. Check the box before "Source code", then click close.

From Terminal:

mkdir ~/Desktop/nautilus-mod
cd ~/Desktop/nautilus-mod
sudo apt-get update
apt-get source nautilus
sudo apt-get build-dep nautilus
cd ~/Desktop/nautilus-mod/nautilus-3*

gedit src/nautilus-toolbar.c

Now, scroll down to line 132 or do a "find" for

gtk_toolbar_insert (GTK_TOOLBAR (self->priv->toolbar), > item, 0)

and change the 0 to a 2. So change the original line

from:

gtk_toolbar_insert (GTK_TOOLBAR (self->priv->toolbar), item,> 0);

To

gtk_toolbar_insert (GTK_TOOLBAR (self->priv->toolbar), item,> 2);

When you're done, click save and close Gedit.

Back in Terminal, run the following:

./configure
make
sudo killall nautilus
sudo make install
nautilus &

At this point, I would actually recommend logging out and back in or just restarting.

To undo the changes and revert back to stock Nautilus, you can either change the "2" back to a "0", re-make and re-install, or you can simply run:

sudo apt-get --reinstall install nautilus

You might want to remove the required dev packages also, but be careful not to remove something that may have already been there and is needed.

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