14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME 3.26 desktop environment will have a lot of great new features and improvements for various of the apps and components shipped with the GNOME Stack, and the Nautilus (GNOME Files) file manager just received a major update.
GNOME 3.26 is about to enter Beta stages of development, and will soon be ready for public beta testing. As part of this important milestone, a lot of the default GNOME apps are getting major improvements, especially Nautilus, which is the default file manager of numerous GNU/Linux distributions.
Nautilus 3.26 Beta (technical version number 3.25.90) has been released today, August 9, 2017, and it looks like it adds stable Flatpak builds, revamped keyboard shortcuts for tab navigation similar to that of the Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome web browsers, and restores the tab functionality.
Mime type support now available for compressed archives
The list of improvements that landed in the Nautilus 3.26 Beta release continues with mime type support for compressed archives, support for the latest Tracker 2.0 search engine, search tool, and metadata storage system, which is now a a hard dependency, and licensed Nautilus extensions.
On top of that, Nautilus now lets users decompress archives on remote locations, provides with tablet pad controllers for common actions, makes use of upstream and newer fallback icons, uses location in description only for GNOME Shell's search functionality, and features full-text search capabilities.
The full-text search functionality (fts) allows users to search inside files content via the Nautilus file manager, which is a pretty cool and highly anticipated feature. To improve productivity, Nautilus 3.26 Beta fixed an issue with the CTRL+Z keyboard shortcut so that it can be used to undo the text when renaming files.
Other noteworthy enhancements implemented in the Nautilus 3.26 Beta release include the ability to display an error on empty name on the Batch Rename dialog, the ability to disable the zoom button when the percentage is at 100%, as well as to disable the create link functionality when the clipboard is empty.
Nautilus will be capable of using portals for launching files in a sandbox environment with the Flatpak Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework, and improves the rubberband for Wacom tablets. You can download the Nautilus 3.26 Beta source tarball right now if you want to test drive the app.