Nautilus is, as told above, the newer graphical file manager for GNOME desktop environment, meant to replace the old, crappy gmc. It was developed by company called Eazel until they closed down; the development is still active, though.
One of the designers of the system is Andy Hertzfeld, an important member of the original Apple Macintosh team back in 1981. The Mac connection doesn't end here - the GNOME 2 folder themes and file emblems were drawn by famed icon graphician Susan Kare.
Nautilus is a very cool file manager, even for a die-hard CLI user like me. Here are some of the interesting features:
- Bookmarks. I can't possibly say how much I love to be able to bookmark a directory, where the heck it happens to be.
- FTP and all GNOME virtual filesystem things actually work. This makes it one of the coolest-looking FTP programs out there =)
- Automatical thumbnail creation - and text files have a couple of first lines visible in the icon. Makes finding of relevant files easy.
- Previewing of music files. Keep mouse pointer over a MP3 or Ogg and it starts playing it, ending when you move the pointer off the icon.
- Resizable icons.
- Emblems. You can give different files and directories an "emblem" - that is, a graphical marker that signifies something. (Heart for "Favorite", Sunglasses for "Cool", and so on...) This helps you to find the right file or folder from among the zillions. (Search function also finds by emblems.)
- All metadata and other data is saved as XML...
- Need to do something tricky to your files? Just write a script, drop it to ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/ and it can be accessed from the script menu!
Microsoftites probably like the following features:
- Capable of using Mozilla/Gecko to render web pages. Yeah, you can type URLs to it and it will open stuff just fine. (This, assumed you've installed the Gecko component, otherwise you get raw HTML...)
- Yeah, it has a "desktop" if you want it. And trash cans. And all the stuff. No need to use that confusing "command line". And you can fill your desktop with your file icons. =)
- It's almost as "pretty" as Windows XP Luna interface. Almost.
Some annoyances:
- Takes a few seconds to start. (And this is a PIII-600 with 256 megs of memory. Nautilus is not for the weak or people of low processor speed. =) The performance is a bit better in Nautilus 2, though.
- Creating and editing app-launching icons is a bit hard. (needs command line stuff and editing...)
- Does not automagically mount filesystems when they're referenced.
- Can't drag link from Mozilla to Nautilus to download it. This could make downloading things easier...
- Does not follow directory symlinks to the linked place. (If I have ~/foo symlinked to /mnt/bar, going to ~/foo should automagically send me to /mnt/bar, but Nautilus says I'm in ~/foo. This will make Newbies feel right at home, but for someone who understands the symlink principle, it's not convinient - and the directory metadata may, in some circumstances, apply to one directory but not the other!) I need to make "Nautilus links" to get there.