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When I hit N in Nautilus under a folder, it behaves like I am searching files which contains N. Can I make it so that it only leads me to the first file whose name starts with N, like Windows Explorer?

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    Have you considered porting Windows Explorer? Commented Jul 16, 2013 at 12:28
  • Nope...I just used to doing it this way while under Windows, Ubuntu and Linux Mint, when there is a large amount of files in one folder. Commented Jul 16, 2013 at 12:36
  • 1
    See related: askubuntu.com/questions/275883/… Commented Jul 16, 2013 at 13:06

3 Answers 3

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When I press the letter N in a folder in Nautilus that contains files whose names start with a letter N it jumps to the first one of these files. Pressing it a 2nd time will begin the search by name (a little box pops up in the lower right hand corner).

There isn't a way to change this behavior using Nautilus. I believe you can use other file explorers though such as mc (aka. midnight commander - terminal based) or Dolphin (KDE).

There's a pretty extensive list of file explorers on wikipedia. Check out the section of *nix ones for other alternatives.

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Ubuntu 17.10 and 18.04

As the type-ahead search was a Ubuntu-specific patch, it got dropped together with Unity in 17.10. However, there is a package called nautilus-typeahead in the Arch repository. Someone took it, compiled for Ubuntu and made a PPA. You can install it by these three commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lubomir-brindza/nautilus-typeahead sudo apt dist-upgrade nautilus -r 

There is an issue on Launchpad about bringing this behavior back to official Ubuntu. The original answer that I found during the search Traditional search-as-you-type on newer Nautilus versions.

Tip: Check the answer link above if your OS older than Ubuntu 17.10 and 18.04

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I just noticed that if you go to nautilus => preferences and disable Search in Subfolders it works as expected.

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  • For me, it doesn't work on 22.04. Which version of Nautilus are you using? Commented Aug 15, 2023 at 12:08
  • I don't use nautilus anymore, so I can't remeber which version I was using at this time :/ Commented Aug 22, 2023 at 9:36

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