Nautilus's split pane lacks an indicator for the active pane

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I see what you mean; that's how it looks to me in Quantal at the moment.

  nautilus version:
  3.5.90.really.3.4.2-0ubuntu2

What version are you running?

Thanks.

I detected it on Precise, but confirmed it on Quantal beta1.
I also have a Precise + Gnome-shell installation using Adwaita as theme, on where I can see the same problem.
Lets hope is not a limitation on Nautilus.

Related bugs:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674793 - this was fixed in Adwaita, then later it was rolled back.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/light-themes/+bug/988240 (i marked this as a duplicate).

Seems like an easy fix in the theme styling, unless there is some other underlying technical reason for which they had to roll back the fix in Adwaita.

What has to be done is simply adding something like:

.nautilus-inactive-pane .view {
 background-color: shade (@bg_color, 0.8);
}

in the gtk-3.0/apps/nautilus.css file for the Ambiance theme. Varying the coefficient (0.8) will make it lighter/darker. Or we could use another color instead of the default bg_color.

After doing some googling, it seems that the extra pane does not exist in Nautilus 3.6 (https://live.gnome.org/Nautilus/Roadmap/3.6 and there's also a discussion here http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/08/ubuntu-12-10-may-ship-with-older-but-more-featured-nautilus). Probably this is why the styling was removed from Adwaita trunk. So, we should ask around if Ubuntu plans to stay with 3.4 for raring, otherwise this bug has no relevance.

Hi RaduStoica. Thanks for taking the time to investigate this.

About the Nautilus versions issue, Ubuntu is using the 3.4 branch on its LTS release, and even if they backport an update to 3.6 (unlikely), the majority of users should keep the 3.4 for 3 years at least, so I think it worth fixing.

Just checked this on Nautilus 3.6.3ubuntu2 on 13.04. The plit pane option seems to be gone there - F3 doesn't split it and the option seems to be missing from the menu.

Is this still a part of Nautilus going forward?

Hi Chris.
As far as I know, the "Split Pane" function will be implemented from scratch on 3.6.x (http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2012/08/30/on-nautilus/). That means that this bug and #1082922 are invalid on this branch.

Thanks for checking it out. Just go ahead and close the paper cuts task in that case.

@Chris: Yes, but as RaduStoica pointed out, this bug in particular seems more related to the Ambiance theme, so perhaps it worth to keep it on papercuts and try to gain approval from someone on Design, since it affects an LTS.

I've asked on #ubuntu-motu how to go about getting a SRU (stable release update) for this. Once we have a fix, we should subscribe ubuntu-sponsors to the bug and wait for someone to pick it up from there. As mentioned above, it would probably help to also get the opinion of someone from design.

This bug report is no longer valid for any currently supported release of Ubuntu so closing.