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stephenmyall
Asked: 2012-05-10 03:33:58 +0800 CST

How do I set default view to 'list' in Nautilus file manager?

  • 772

I would like to set my Nautilus "Default view" to List globally on my PC.

Is this possible, if so, how do I achieve this?

Linked Question (old)

nautilus customization filemanager

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    First, reset all previous folder view preferences by deleting ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata (source)

    Next, open Nautilus and select Edit -> Preferences -> Views (tab) -> View new folders using , and change to List View:

    Nautilus prefs dialogue

    • 129

  2. For everyone who likes to do things by terminal changing the settings for nautilus can be done by 

    gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences default-folder-viewer 'list-view'

    If you need to find out which settings are applied to nautilus you can go

    gsettings get org.gnome.nautilus.preferences default-folder-viewer

    The credits for this post go to: https://scivision.co/ubuntu-setting-nautilus-default-view-to-detailed-list-view/

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  3. Other possible way of solving this is through dconf Editor, see org.gnome.nautilus.preferences and default-folder-viewer there.

    prefs picture

    This means there would be a simple one-line expression to change this, so you can include it easily to your config/setup scripts. See more on dconf.

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  4. For Gnome 2, the following should be enough:

    sudo gconftool-2 --direct --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults --type string --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/default_folder_viewer list_view

    Other possible values are icon_view and compact_view

    For Ubuntu 12.04 and similar Unity-based UI, edit /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gnome.nautilus.gschema.xml file: find the default-folder-viewer key and replace its <default> tag value by 'list-view'

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