Search Me . . .


Your Ubuntu Linux system may not have a lot of files in your home folder, but that won't last long; I promise. There's an old adage that suggests, "data will grow to fill all available disk space." In my experience, that's a fact. In time, that big drive of yours just won't seem big enough.

This means that at some point, you are going to have some trouble finding the files you created. It's a good thing Nautilus has a quick find built in. I've got a lot of music ripped on my Linux system (see Chapter 17). I like to listen to it when I work. Let's pretend that I want to find out in which folder my Pink Floyd songs are stored. Just press <Ctrl+F> and a Search box appears. Type in some part of the filename you are searching for (for example, Pink Floyd) and press <Enter>. Nautilus displays the results in the main window (see Figure 4-6).

Figure 4-6. Looking for something? Just press <Ctrl+F> and enter some part of a filename to let Nautilus do its thing.


Navigating the Side Panel

We should spend a couple of minutes looking at the left panelor as I like to call it, the navigation panel. You've already seen how to use it to switch from a Places view to a Tree view of your file system. But wait (as they say on television), there's more. As you recall, there is a drop-down list that lets you change the way you look at your system. I've already had you switch from Places view to Tree view and that has affected how you navigate your file system. However, there are other interesting options in that list and I'd like to look at them now (see Figure 4-7).

Figure 4-7. The left panel provides a number of ways to view, catalog, and identify the content in your folders.


Because we've already covered Places and Tree, I'm going to continue with Information. When you click here, the side window displays information about the current folder. That includes the name of the folder, its icon (you can change the default icon for each folder, which is covered later), the number of items in that folder, and the date it was last modified (when files were added or removed).

The next possible selection is History. Clicking here shows you recent folders you have visited (in the order you visited them), network folders, FTP sites, and any searches you may have performed. This last item is particularly cool because if you need to, you can revisit a particular search by double-clicking it in the history listing. The same holds true for folders. Double-click and there you are.

Tip

If you want to be able to quickly come back to a particular folder or site, you can bookmark that location by clicking Bookmarks on the menu bar and selecting Add Bookmark (you can also press <Ctrl+D>). To go back to a bookmark, click Bookmarks again and select it with a click.


Now, we come to Notes. With every folder, you can add notes about the content. This is free-form text that helps you identify the contents or alert you that there is something of note there. For instance, let's say you've got a folder named Holiday Shots and inside that folder is where you keep those really embarrassing photos from the company Christmas party. You might want to add a note to that effect as a reminder a few months later. When you do that, a small note appears to be pinned to your folder (see Figure 4-8).

Figure 4-8. When you add a note to a folder, a note icon is tacked to the folder icon.


This little added decoration on the folder segues very nicely into the last choice in our little side panel list, and that's the Emblems selection. Click here and the side panel fills up with a list of graphical icons (see Figure 4-9). These are designed to give you a quick way to identify the importance or relevance of a particular file or folder.

Figure 4-9. Emblems provide a quick and visually interesting way to identify files or folders.


All you have to do is click one of those icons and drag it over to a file or folder. There are tons of these emblems with names like Art, Certified, Cool, Favorite, Important, Oh No!, and more. Should you find that you have added too many emblems (since you are doing that right now!), drag the Erase icon (located at the top of the list) onto your file or folder. The emblems you added there vanish.




Moving to Ubuntu Linux
Moving to Ubuntu Linux
ISBN: 032142722X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 201

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