Some Lucid Beta testers, myself included, have noticed some functionality has been removed from the Nautilus file browser. There used to be a toggle button for the location bar to switch it between button and text-based displays.

A “paper cuts” bug, originally filed in June 2009, explained the choice of icon to represent the button implied that it was for text editing or word processing. As the discussion went on, it was decided that the text-based display was for more advanced users and therefore the choice to enable it be made into an “advanced option”.

The current verison of Gnome being packaged with Lucid does away with this toggle button so that the location bar is always in button mode. There is however a keyboard shortcut, CTRL+L, to toggle it to text-based temporarily. Using / to start typing a location will also initiate the toggle.

If you want the location bar to be text-based all of the time, you can use gconf-editor to enable it. The key to change is:

/apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry

… which will need to be check-marked. You can do the same with gconftool-2 at a command line.

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry --type=bool true

To turn it back off, set it to false.

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry --type=bool false

Both the keyboard shortcuts and gconf settings work with Nautilus in both Karmic using Gnome 2.28.1 and Lucid Beta-1 using Gnome 2.29.92. I’m unsure if they work pre-Karmic.

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