GNOME Files

GNOME Files, formerly called Nautilus, is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. The name is a play on words, evoking the shell of a nautilus to represent an operating system shell. Nautilus replaced Midnight Commander in GNOME 1.4 (2001) and has been the default from version 2.0 onwards.

Nautilus was the flagship product of the now-defunct Eazel Inc company. Released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, Nautilus is free software.

History

Nautilus was first released in 2001 and development has continued ever since. The following is a brief timeline of its development history:

File manager

A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening (e.g. viewing, playing, editing or printing), renaming, moving or copying, deleting and searching for files, as well as modifying file attributes, properties and file permissions. Folders and files may be displayed in a hierarchical tree based on their directory structure. Some file managers contain features inspired by web browsers, including forward and back navigational buttons.

Some file managers provide network connectivity via protocols, such as FTP, NFS, SMB or WebDAV. This is achieved by allowing the user to browse for a file server (connecting and accessing the server's file system like a local file system) or by providing its own full client implementations for file server protocols.

Directory editors

A term that predates the usage of file manager is directory editor. The first directory editor, DIRED, was invented circa 1974 at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab by Stan Kugell

File Manager (Windows)

File Manager is a file manager program bundled with releases of Microsoft Windows between 1990 and 1999. It was a single-instance graphical interface, replacing the command-line interface of MS-DOS, to manage files (copy, move, open, delete, search, etc.). Although File Manager was included in Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 and some later versions, Windows Explorer was introduced and used as the primary file manager, with file management via a 2-pane view different from File Manager's, and a single-pane view obtained by clicking a "My Computer" icon.

Overview

The program's interface showed a list of directories on the left hand panel, and a list of the current directory's contents on the right hand panel. File Manager allowed a user to create, rename, move, print, copy, search for, and delete files and directories, as well as to set permissions (attributes) such as archive, read-only, hidden or system, and to associate file types with programs. Also available were tools to label and format disks, manage folders for file sharing and to connect and disconnect from a network drive. On Windows NT systems it was also possible to set ACLs on files and folders on NTFS partitions through the shell32 security configuration dialog (also used by Explorer and other Windows file managers). On NTFS drives, individual files or entire folders could be compressed or expanded.