the corner office

I'm trying out Gnome for a bit, and I have to have a bit of a gripe about Nautilus, Gnome's default file browser. Perhaps I'm missing some deep Unix voodoo (I strongly doubt it), but it's piss-poorly designed.

In no particular order, a list of things that suck about Nautilus:

• if you create a new folder (say, Alt-F-F), you get a new folder, highlighted, called 'untitled folder'. Cool. But you have to manually invoke the edit command (say, F2) to actually change the bloody name. Windows Explorer, in comparison, knows you probably don't expect to leave the folder named 'Untitled', and automatically puts the name in edit mode.
  
• if that's not daft enough, as soon as you've typed in the name and hit Enter, the directory you're in automatically re-sorts itself. Your newly-named folder shuffles off elsewhere and you're left with a totally different folder highlighted. You have to go digging to find the one you've just renamed, which in busy directories is a pain. Why Lord why? Windows Explorer knows that if you edited the name, you might wish to continue working the directory, and keeps focus on it.
  
• there's a global setting to show the number of files in each folder. Needless to say, it chugs like hell if you leave it enabled. So you disable it. But try to open the Properties for a folder, and it won't give you the number of files in the directory and subdirs, or the total size for that matter. What the...?
  
• Click-and-drag to select a number of files? Think again. You have to select or Ctrl-select the files/folders you want to work with. Which makes me wonder why the Gnome desktop even has click-and-drag enabled. What a bloody waste.
  
• Oh yes, and it's dog slow.

I'm using Nautilus 2.6.3. It's been around. You'd think these sorts of problems would have been ironed out in the Beta days.

KDE's Konqueror is better, but it ain't no Windows Explorer either. And I never was a fan of Norton Commander (is that what it was called?), so the whole dual-pane DOS-style file manager thing doesn't appeal, which wipes away swathes of Linux file managers. I want a file manager that looks enough like the classic tree-style Windows Explorer in list view and does the same job with the same intuitive things that Windows Explorer has that I never really appreciated until I started using a file manager that didn't have them. I don't care about previews or thumbnails, I don't care about tabbed interfaces and I don't care about backgrounds and themes and fancy icons and crap.

The command line rocks for some things, but sometimes you want a good file manager. I'm still trying to find one for Linux.