Before upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, I was using Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS. When I was in the file browser, I was able to access a file just by writing some letters; it just got selected and it was super fast.
After upgrading, when I start typing a search is launched and it's a little bit slow. I prefer the old method.
I tried searching on the internet but didn't know exactly what to type on the search bar.
How can I disable this automatic search? Thank you
Type Ahead search was removed completely from Nautilus, aka GNOME Files, since Artful. Luckily, there is a patch on GitHub that adds this functionality back to Nautilus 3.26.3, the version installed by default in Ubuntu 18.04. Now if you want to apply the patch and build Nautilus from source, go ahead, but there is a guy that did the job for us and provided a PPA to install the patched Nautilus directly:
Then upgrade using
sudo apt full-upgrade
and kill Filesnautilus -q
Please note that this will overwrite the standard version of Nautilus 3.26 in Ubuntu 18.04 with a third-party build. If you're from the paranoid type you're better off using Nemo or Caja instead.
Source: [1]