What is the state of nautilus type-ahead in 24.04?

Question

About the good old nautilus type-ahead that was removed at least 7 years ago and people keep trying to add back.

Gnome current behavior: I type "R" in in Nautilus (now known as Gnome Files) and it starts showing all the files and folders in my entire system that contain the letter "r" in their names.

Desired behavior: I type "R" and the cursor just goes to the files in the current folder that start with "r". I type "R" and "A" and the cursor goes to the files that start with "ra".

Edit: ignore when I said I tried adding https://github.com/lubomir-brindza/nautilus-typeahead, which claims to be working for 24.04, but it isn't. It actually works!

Answer 1

The good old nautilus type-ahead has been deprecated and is not coming back in the official builds. However, the search into subfolders can be turned off in preferences. Then, only matching filenames of the current folder are displayed, approaching a bit more the traditional behavior with type-ahead (and actually making it more powerfull).

The concept of the current behavior is to be able to quickly access a file or folder existing somewhere beneath the current folder, without the need to manually traverse directories, sometimes many levels deep. It also removes the restriction of working only on the first characters of the file name. For example, in some use cases, people prepend a file name with a date. The current search function still allow to easily retrieve files based on parts of the name in such scenario.

Answer 2

Thanks to vanadium's answer and some trial and error, I figured out how to obtain the pre-2017 behavior.

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:lubomir-brindza/nautilus-typeahead
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
nautilus -q

Now open Nautilus, Preferences, and disable "Search on type ahead".

Thank you Arch Linux community for keeping the patch updated, L'ubomír Brindza for maintaining the PPA, and Xavier Claessens for updating the most recent versions in Ubuntu.