Nautilus Has a New Look in GNOME 45

The latest nightly builds of the Nautilus file manager sport a split header-bar look.

And if all goes to plan, Nautilus’ new two-panel look will roll out to all when GNOME 45 is released in September.

The new design extends Nautilus’ sidebar to the full height of the window, gains the title “Places”, and becomes the new home for the file manager’s hamburger menu:

Nautilus in GNOME 45 Beta 1 (Back) and Beta 2 (Front)

The sidebar also becomes the new home for the widget relaying active file transfer and extraction progress:

Transfer progress widget gets a new home

The new design isn’t here to look pretty (though that it does) but to take advantage of the improvements present in Libadwaita 1.4, which also ships as part of GNOME 45.

GNOME devs want as many of the desktop’s core apps to support the changes libadwaita 1.4 introduces, which improve, amongst other things, ‘adaptivity’.

UI freeze has passed for GNOME 45 so a freeze break exception was requested and granted. The new design is present in the latest GNOME nightly builds of Nautilus, and has already been issued as an update to those testing Fedora 39 Workstation.

If no major show-stopping issues are encountered between now and release, the new split-pane Nautilus will ship as part of GNOME 45 next month.

Thanks Sean

Spread the love