Nautilus is a next-generation GNOME file manager from the folks over at Eazel. I've been hearing a lot about Nautilus lately, and I was curious to see what all the hype is about. This article covers my experience installing and running Nautilus. The impatient can bypass my obtuse rambling and skip straight to the summary.

Before I begin, I should mention that I am biased. I was a contributor to EFM, and I am an active developer for the next version of Enlightenment. On the other hand, Eazel has a lot of talent on their development team, so they should easily be able to take file management to the next level and impress an old-school Mac zealot such as myself.

First of all, the automated installer is very similar to the one provided by Helix GNOME; in other words, it absolutely sucks. It "recommends" you download the installer script to your /tmp directory, cd to /tmp, then run the installer script. If you try to do anything tricky, such as run the installer script from a directory other than /tmp, or run the script as root (as opposed to the "recommended" method of running as as a user and letting the script run su), the installer script bombs out completely. The Helix GNOME installer gets points for allowing you to customize how much crap to install; the Nautilus installer doesn't give you any choice at all. So what if I have a recent Mozilla nightly build? According to the Nautilus installer, what I really want is the M18 RPM. Oh yeah, the Nautilus installer told me I had an obsolete version of Gnumeric and proceded to remove it. Unfortunately, it couldn't find a more recent version, so now I have no Gnumeric. Thanks Eazel! I appreciate how GUIs and desktop environemnts remove the underlying complexities. Nautilus and Helix GNOME have managed to eliminate the particularly pesky ones: configurability, adaptability, and common sense.

I finally got past the "easy install" by force quitting the frozen application and installing the cached RPMs manually. I elected to leave EFM open on my desktop (I actually use that to get real work done), so the pretty icons you see on the desktop in no way correlate to the hell that is Nautilus. Anyways, upon running Nautilus, I was greeted with the following screen:

The first thing I noticed after loading our savior Nautilus (besides my CPU Load Epplet going off the chart), is that there doesn't appear to be a way to turn the goddamn toolbar text labels off. I hate text labels, so allow me to reiterate: there doesn't appear to be a way to turn the goddamn text labels off. To be fair, it's possible I just couldn't find the option for it. In EFM most configuration is just drag-n-drop, but Nautilus takes view configuration to a whole new level of Redmond-induced insanity. That's right, there are at least four arbitrarly placed view configuration dialogs, none of which are located in the View menu. Eat your heart out, Bill Gates. Here's a screenshot of all the different View configuration panes I found:

Notice how I detached the Edit, View, and "User Mode" menus? Three of the view configuration dialogs are ambiguously named and placed in the Edit menu, one of the dialogs is at the bottom of the "User Mode" menu, and none of the dialogs are accessible via the View menu. Now that's intuitive design!

Anyways, after I realized there wasn't any way to turn the goddamn toolbar text labels off, I decided to see what other interface goodies were available. It turns out you can resize or even hide the useless Win98-ish panel. That's nice, but why do that when you can just fill it with all sorts of annoying crap instead? Nautilus makes it possible to make your useless, screen real estate-gobbling directory panels even uglier than ones in Windows 98. That's right! Irritate your coworkers and and boggle User Interface experts everywhere with directory panel themes. Save useless tidbits of information with directory panel notes. Further blur the line between usability and web-file manager integration with directory panel history. The list and memory requirements go on forever! This next screenshot demonstrates directory panel theming, directory panel notes, and an iMac marketing-style named color palette. While you're laughing at it, try and think of just one way the directory notes could be useful.

For those of you who might have forgotten, the Eazel development team includes some of the original MacOS developers. For it's time, MacOS was simple, intuitive, lightweight, and attractive. So far, Eazel has managed to make Nautilus none of these things. Fortunately they did manage to include at least one feature from MacOS: Labels. Who cares if they're useless? Labels are back in 2000! Of course, the Nautilus team spiced them up a bit for the new millenium; now they're called "Emblems". Plus they're hidden in one of those damned obscure view configuration dialogs -- god help the poor soul who tries to remove the "Secret" Emblem from his pr0n directory. Make no mistake, Emblems are cool. You don't just want a usable file manager/web browser/mp3 player/notepad/kitchen sink/whatever -- you want one that's cool. To show you just what a cool desktop looks like, I have marked several items in my home directory with Emblems. You'll note that most items in my home dIrectory are cool, but my next-generation home directory also features a Secret patch, and an Oh No download directory (marked as such because it contains the Nautilus download -- Oh No is the closest Emblem I could find to THIS SUCKS ASS).

One of the more useful features is zooming. I mean it would be completely useless, except it appears the 400% zoom mode is the only way to see all the information associated with a file (besides right-clicking and opening the preferences dialog or switching to the equally infuriating list view, that is). Even Windows 98 is smart enough to use the accursed directory panel for something like this. Just to put things in context, that's 400% zoom. Anyway, here's a look at 400% zoom, list view, and a few more useless directory panel features. I think this is the last screenshot I can bear to take.

Summary

The Good:

• If you're currently using GMC, Emacs, or a wet paper bag as your file manager, Nautilus will be an improvement.
• If you have ludicrous amounts of RAM, Nautilus will finally allow you to test that swap partition.
• Eazel has a neat looking logo.
• Dumb people who listen to the hype on Slashdot and try to use Nautilus will now be operating at a quarter of their previous speed.
• Zooming to 400% in order to read text files is much more fun than typing head in an open term.
• You can install KFM now, and EFM will be out within two years. Also, bash is just a terminal away.

The Bad:

• There doesn't appear to be a way to turn the goddamn toolbar text labels off.
• Modem users may feel inclined to attack the Eazel developers with rocks and pointy sticks after wasting an entire evening downloading this piece of crap.
• Contrary to popular Redmond lore, A million cryptic configuration dialogs does not a usable program make.
• GNOME is going to ship with Nautilus eventually.
• The Eazel installer does not reserve the right to remove my old, stable software (eg Gnumeric) and replace it with nothing.
• The Nautilus download page requests an email address to spam in order to download their bloatware. They will get spam comlaints from the people using eat@me.com and suck@it.net.

Nautilus is, as Tom Gilbert puts it, all about well implemented dumb ideas. Sure, they've got CORBA, gdk_pixbuf, and GNOME integration, but none of these things matter if using Nautilus makes me want to punch my monitor. In order to succeed, both Eazel and GNOME need to realize the Free Software movement isn't about making a better implementation of Microsoft's shoddy computing interface. Above all, they need to provide a way to turn of the goddamn text labels.

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