Ubuntu – Popping up the folder when clicking “Show in Folder”

The specific feature you asked about is not availaale, but here are a couple of alternatives:

1. When nautilus is open at the relevant directory, just start typing the first few letters of the file name. This will highlight the file.

2. Using the following tools you can use the clipboard and skip the typing, as follows: Install these: sudo apt-get install nautilus-scripts-manager xdotool xsel
   Then create the following nautilus-script in the nautilus-scripts-manager directory.

   #!/bin/bash                           
 xdotool type $(xsel -o -b; sleep .3) 

Next, assign a short-cut key to run the script.
It is very practical to use a short-cut key which is local to nautilus. You can do this via a combination of nautilus-scripts-manager's sub-menu item for this script (under nautilus' File menu), and a gnome short-cut key manager tool, which is described in this link: "Editable Menu Accelerators" (on a per app basis).

Set up a short-cut key, eg. Ctrl-Shift-S, and then just copy the filename to the clipboard. amd run the script via the short-cut key. This will "type" the text in the clipbooard, as though you typed it, and the nautilus auto-search feature will pinpoint the file and highlight it.

More: You could modify the script to strip out the filename from the downoad link... This means that you could sometimes(often?) just copy the download link to the clipboard.

It's a longstanding issue which was reported here for Chromium. At that time, there was no way to select an individual item in a folder, only open the folder, and so was marked as fixed, with half of it being implemented. However, according to this bug report, Nautilus has implemented the ability to select individual items, and it seems so has Dolphin (KDE equivalent of Nautilus). Perhaps it's time to open a new bug on this.