date and time of overwriting files in nautilus

[alanmoore]

Hi, everybody!

There's something I find missing in Gnome compared to when I used to work with Windows XP (which, overall, I hated). In most file managers0, when I want to save or paste a file to a directory that already contains a file with the same name, the file manager shows a message asking if I really want to overwrite the file or not. In windows Xp (and in KDE I think), the file manager also gives you information about the file, its size and the date and time when it was modified for the last time. It helps a lot in order to be sure that the file you are overwriting is older that the one you want to save or paste.

But in Nautilus no information of that kind is shown. It only gives you the options. To be sure that what you're doing is safe for your information, you have to close the dialog box and check the properties of both files in the conceptual menu (right-cliking on both icons). It makes file managing deceptive and, hence, less secure and slower.

Is there any way I can work this around to behave like windows explorer? Any Nautilus script? Any plugin? Anything?

Thank you. It's really the only one thing about Nautilus (and Gnome, for that matter) that I find annoying.

[coffeecat]

It's really the only one thing about Nautilus (and Gnome, for that matter) that I find annoying.

I agree with you 100%. I found this quite disconcerting when I started with Linux.

This doesn't answer your question directly, but have you tried gnome-commander? It's in the repos. It displays a similar skip, replace, etc popup as Nautilus (in fact, I think it might be the same one) but at least you can still see the timestamps in the two panes of the file manager.

[alanmoore]

Ok. I'd still like to work this around with nautilus, because I like it and the scripts you can use in it a lot. But I'll give it a try. Thank you.