What’s new in Files (and GVfs) for GNOME 3.36?

After Carlos Soriano and Ernestas Kulik left Files (Nautilus) development, António Fernandes and I are now officially new maintainers. Given the limited manpower, the focus is more on fixing bugs, but some neat new features have been added to Files and GVfs as well. I just explain shortly that GVfs provides access to various protocols and remote shares for Files among others. I hope I will find some time soon to write a new post about GVfs in general. But let’s move back to the news in this release.

Hidden files as templates

Hidden files (resp. files beginning with a dot) can be now also used as templates. So you can simply create for example .htaccess or .gitignore over the context menu if you add those files in your templates dir. I just note that they are visible in the context menu only if hidden files are shown.

Move and copy support on Google Drive

Mayank Sharma provided missing support for the move and copy operations for Google Drive backend. He worked on it mainly during Google Summer of Code last year. It took such a long time especially because Google Drive is not a classical filesystem and there are many and many corner cases that need to be handled. If you are interested in details, you can find some on his blog, or on GitLab issue.

I would like to mention here one new related gio tool feature. Google Drive files are represented by database IDs and their titles are stored as separate attributes. So it is hard to work with those files from the command line. But now you can use gio list --print-display-names [URI] to easily show the titles instead of the unreadable IDs.

GOA shares with self-signed certificates

Earlier it was not been possible to access Nextcloud or ownCloud shares configured over Gnome Online Accounts (GOA) if they used self-signed or invalid certificates. Now you should see a prompt to confirm such certificate during the mount operation.

Also here, I would like to mention one related GLib improvement. You can now use gio mount --device [UUID] to mount shares configured over GOA. This will cause that credentials from GOA are used and don’t have to be specified manually.

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In the end, I would like to thank all who made some contributions during this cycle, especially to all newcomers. Also, I would like to thank António, who helps me to get familiar with Files and does a great job as maintainer.