I have a music folder that contains about 15 other folders, each only a single level deep. Is there any way, via keyboard or other, to open the music folder in list view and expand all of the contained folders as well? I know about using * to open a nested folder, but that only opens the immediate children of of the selected folder.
Here's the directory structure:
Music
Billy Joel
Storm Front
Shameless
She's Got a Way
Glass Houses
For the Longest Time
Coldplay
Parachutes
Yellow
X&Y
Fix You
What I want to be able to do is open Nautilus to the Music folder, then click or type something to expand all the folders to display their contents as above. Right now, when I go into Music, all I see is:
Music
Billy Joel
Coldplay
There is an upstream bug about this, but unfortunately it's open since 2003 and probably won't receive a fix in the near future.
Don't know if there's a Nautilus script that allows you to expand/collapse all folders.
What does work, is to expand directories "level-by-level" by using the asterisk (*) multiple times (first time it expands all subdirectories, second time all subdirectories of subdirectories, etc.) - it's close to what you want, but admittedly not optimal.
The list may be expanded by first selecting List View from the Main Toolbar, selecting the folder that you want to expand, then pressing the asterisk (*) key on the numeric keypad or on the regular typing keyboard. (On U.S. keyboard layouts asterisk is Shift-8, for example.)
If you select the top directory in the list, it and all sub-directories below will be expanded by one level.
If you select a directory further down the list, then it and all sub-directories below will be expanded by one level, but not those above.
Each time the asterisk key is pressed, the list will be expanded by an additional level.
To collapse the list in a single step, press the / or - key on the numeric keypad, or their equivalents on the typing keyboard.
If you view the left side pane in Tree view, the same keystrokes work there, too, except individual file names are not displayed.
(Determined experimentally with Nautilus 2.30.1 on Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS.)