The list of shortcuts will not be very long, but only a few will be added that will allow us to perform the most common actions in any file manager. It is also important to say that the order of the list has no hierarchy, that is, that those that appear first are no more important than those that appear at the end. Without further ado, let me tell you about keyboard shortcuts which I use most in Nautilus.
Table of Contents
Very useful Nautilus keyboard shortcuts
Show hidden files
It won’t always be necessary and it’s worth not showing them if we don’t know what we’re doing, but it can be a very useful option. In almost any operating system, there are hidden files that are in this state for our safety. But if we want to see this kind of information for whatever, such as copying the folder .mozilla to recover all Firefox settings if we are going to install the system from 0, we will have to see the hidden files.
In Ubuntu, this is as simple as opening a Nautilus window and pressing Ctrl + H.
Close all Nautilus windows
If we have opened many file manager windows and do not want to waste time looking for the X to close them all, we can do it all at once using the shortcut Ctrl + Q. If we only want to close one, we should use the combination Ctrl + W.
Create a shortcut
Change the view type
Duplicate a file
Even more interesting to do a duplicate may be to do the same but pressing Alt instead of Ctrl. I find it more interesting because it will allow us to Move, Copy or Link (create a shortcut). To move a file is what interests me most, as it will allow us, for example, to move to the desktop what we have in a Pendrive. I don’t know if you know that when you delete any file from a Pendrive on Unix-based operating systems, those files are put in the .Trash folder, so to delete a file from a Pendrive we have to move it to the hard drive of our computer, which copies the file to another path not without first completely deleting the original file.
Rename a file
View information from a file
Open a folder in a new tab
Users have long been accustomed to using tabs in different file managers. Nautilus has been offering us this possibility for a long time and if we want to open a folder in a new Nautilus tab, we can do so by selecting it and using the shortcut Shift + Return (Enter).
Create a new folder
If we want to create a new folder, we can always do it with the mouse, but as this post is about shortcuts, what we will use to create a new folder will be Ctrl + Shift + N. If we do not press Shift and leave only Ctrl + N, we will open a new Nautilus window.
Move to trash
When we work with multiple temporary files, as has been the case with this post and its screenshots, we will have a folder full of photos. I like to leave these files on the Desktop, do the work and delete them to leave my desktop clean again. If we want to delete all these files at once, it is best to use the combination Fn + Delete. “Fn” is the “Function” key that is available on many computers and the delete key may be on some computers such as “DEL”.
What are your favorite Nautilus shortcuts?
