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If you prefer a more complex file display, right-click on any directory and choose Browse Folder . Browse mode includes the location bar absent from the normal Nautilus display mode, and also includes the left-side pane. At the top of the left pane is a selector for different information displays:

Information

Displays basic information about the current folder.

Emblems

Displays a list of available emblems, small badges you can add to any file's icon. Drag them from the side pane onto any file to mark it. For example, if you have several similar images in a folder, you might want to drag the "Cool" or "Favorite" emblem to remind you which one you like best. You can also set emblems by selecting Edit → Background and Emblems.

History

Shows a list of previous locations you have displayed in Nautilus. Double-click any folder to return to it.

Notes

Allows a note to be kept on a particular folder. Each folder has a different page of notes.

Tree

Perhaps the most useful of the side-pane tools, this allows you to navigate a complex folder hierarchy with convenient spin-down triangles. Each folder in the tree is displayed with a triangle next to it; click the folder to open it, or click the triangle to display any subfolders without actually visiting the folder itself.

Some neat Nautilus features include the following:

Instead of a generic image icon for graphics files, Nautilus uses scaled-down thumbnails of the image itself. This makes it easy to organize directories full of images, such as those pulled from a digital camera.

If you hover your mouse over a music file, the file will begin to play.

For text files, the plain document icon is decorated by the actual text contents of the file. That way, you can remember how the file starts without having to open it, even if you didn't give it the most descriptive name.

You can stretch icons by right-clicking them and choosing Stretch Icon. If you stretch a text icon enough, you can see the entire contents of the file, and use it as a desktop notepad.

Select Edit → Backgrounds and Emblems to choose different emblems to decorate icons. You can also drag colors and patterns from this area to set your desktop and panel background. To set an image as the desktop background, right-click on the desktop and choose Change Desktop Background.

All in all, Nautilus is a versatile tool that you can learn to use just by poking around a little. For additional help, just choose Help and then Nautilus User Manual from any Nautilus window.

Expert Settings: GConf

GConf is a centralized, XML-based configuration system for desktop applications. It allows applications to share keyboard shortcuts, themes, and other preferences, and uses a daemon to notify applications when preferences change, so you don't have to restart the application to see a change take effect.

GConf can also be used to lock down a desktop system with a finer degree of granularity than traditional Unix file locking. An administrator might wish to lock GConf settings to permit some, but not all, behavior for a given application, and allow some, but not all, changes in preferences. Administrators of kiosks, public computer labs, and other security- and support-conscious deployments find system lockdown to be indispensable. Therefore, most applications provide a lockdown section in their GConf files. If you have users you want to keep out of trouble, explore these options in greater detail. One good resource is the GNOME System Administrator's Guide, available at http://www.gnome.org.

In this book, we assume that you're not interested in locking preferences down, but in opening things up and tweaking them to your taste. That's where gconf-editor comes in handy. You can, of course, edit the XML files in ~/.gconf yourself, but the gconf-editor application makes things a little more convenient.

To get started, run the command gconf-editor. On the left side of the window is the GConf hierarchy, arranged