Emacs vs GNOME Files (Nautilus)

While it's better than it used to be, with most functions being possible through the menu, Emacs is still quite a bit different from your standard editor. You'll need to learn new keyboard shortcuts.

If I ever want to lose half a day, I'll start by tweaking my .spacemacs config file.

For example, for navigation it uses the b, n, p, l keys. Which for some people may seem strange in the begging. However they can be changed easily.

Although lots of good built-in documentation _exists_, I have after four years of Emacs as my primary editor not figured out how to actually make use of it, and rely completely on Google / StackOverflow for help.

I was using Emacs in the early 1980's, before there were GUIs. In fairness to Emacs, its original design was conceived in that context and is rather good at some things, like flexible ability to bind commands to keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, it didn't keep up with the times and fails to take advantage of the entire world of GUI design that's revolutionized computer science since then. So Emacs does 5% or what an editor should do quite will, and is surprisingly under-powered and old fashioned at the other 95%. To this day, it lacks or struggles with very basic things, like interactive dialogs, toolbars, tabbed interface, file system navigation, etc., etc. The things I just mentioned, are all present in some limited and inept form, but falls far short of current standard of good user interface design. For this reason, I would not recommend Emacs to anyone who is under 50 year old, or who needs power user capabilities. For casual, unsophisticated applications by someone who grew up with green screen character based computers, it's probably OK.

The language that's used for user customization, extensions, and for much of the basic editor functionality, is Emacs lisp, or elisp for short. I actually like lisp in general, especially Scheme, but unfortunately, elisp is one of the worst versions of lisp ever created, barely meriting being called lisp. It's very slow, impoverished in features, inconsistent, and rather inelegant in design. Elisp needed to be overhauled 20 or 30 years ago, but the Emacs developers were not willing to do the work. I believe this is one of the major reasons Emacs is so buggy, lacking in features, development is so slow, and consequently almost nobody uses it (or should use it) anymore.

It's not clear to what extent Emacs is still supported. There's still some development taking place, but so slow that it's almost an abandoned project. There are numerous bugs in Emacs, many these days associated with start up and package management. When you search the Internet for solutions, you often find many posts, sometimes going back months or even years, with no clear fix.

For customization, you need to learn Lisp.

As already stated, this is not well configurable anymore. One can not even start in dual pane mode for cut/copy and paste. Just a ridiculous transgression. It was great just 1-2 years ago, but over-simplification in this case is detrimental to functionality.

There are not many ways to configure Nautilus to fit your needs. Besides what can be seen in the settings button you can't configure it further.

It is not updated frequently and Ubuntu could stop using Nautilus and switch to Nemo.

It should list by full year month day, no matter whether it was today, last month or years ago. Displays wrong time modified for photos I took and downloaded today (not exif time taken and not anything that makes sense). Not customizable in any way one would expect.

Sometimes about 600MB of RAM goes somewhere...

A move, even to the same disk, can take a minute for a folder containing a hundred images.

If the file list is long enough to fill the screen, then there is no empty place to click for bringing the context menu. Need to change the view to Grid view, then right click.

This is the last missing feature that was removed long time ago and makes Nemo competitive. Should be reimplemented remembering view type and icon size folder by folder.

In order to create a new folder within another folder that is full to the bottom of the page, we must create a folder in an open area somewhere else, then move the sub-folder into that full folder. Even worse, we need to use the "Move to..." option, with so many extra clicks, instead of just being able to copy and paste as before.

"+ Other Locations" in the left pane now forces us to click twice or more in order to access additional drives, even the local "Computer." Having all of the drives listed on the left side was quick and easy, and the drive "Properties" were available just by right clicking once, although drive "Properties" is no longer available when clicking on "+ Other Locations," then right clicking on the drives.

I still use Debian 8 for the older Nautilus, even though the developers already damaged that older version as well. However, Nautilus is completely useless to me now in Debian 10 so I am seeking for a new graphical desktop to replace Gnome and Nautilus...I am fed up with the developers.

There are too many bugs at the current state for this file browser to be usable.