At some point of time, the Nautilus developers decided to drop the idea of interactive typeahead - the feature that allows you to type in the start of a file and have it be selected in the current directory, instead of applying the typed text as a filter on a recursive search.
This project aims to bring back that feature, by patching the source code back to what it should be.
A big shoutout to ElectricPrism who has a set of patches on at his repository for AUR, which I adapted to Nautilus 3.22.3-1 on Debian. I have also now adapted it to Nautilus 3.30.5 on Debian.
Another big shoutout to M4he who provided code modifications in this pull request, which I was then able to split into a separate patch to simplify understanding of the changes.
This project has been only tested on Debian Stable (Buster) with Nautilus 3.30.5.
If you are not on this exact version, YMMV.
A set of .deb files are in this project's releases (and also in this folder). Simply download that to a new directory, and run sudo dpkg -i *.deb to install it, and then run gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences enable-interactive-search true to enable interactive typeahead. You might need to run nautilus -q once for the changes to be incorporated (or just reboot).
It should be as easy as sudo apt install --reinstall nautilus, but why would you want to remove this feature?
The recursive search is still accessible via Ctrl+F, and if you want to disable interactive typeahead, simply run gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences enable-interactive-search false.
First off, we will need to have the Debian build tools, as well as the dependencies for building Nautilus:
sudo apt install devscripts
sudo apt build-dep nautilus
Then, make a new folder to build nautilus:
mkdir nautilus-build
cd nautilus-build
Download nautilus, and apply our patch:
apt source nautilus
cd nautilus-3.30.5
patch -p1 -i ../../0001-Add-back-interactive-typeahead-to-nautilus.patch
patch -p1 -i ../../0002-Fix-issue-with-crash-upon-enter.patch
patch -p1 -i ../../0003-Fix-patches-to-make-it-compile-again.patch
Make sure that we update the version number:
dch -ltypeahead # You can add a description to the changelog if you like here
Build nautilus:
fakeroot debian/rules binary
This will generate a bunch of .deb files which we then install:
sudo dpkg -i ../*.deb
Final steps, to enable the settings:
gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences enable-interactive-search true
nautilus -q
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