Reenabling the Delete Key in Gnome 3 Nautilus

In Nautilus Gnome 2, the Delete key used to send selected items to the trash. To do the same in Gnome 3, you now have to use the shortcut: Ctrl+Delete. That's kind of annoying. To change it back, grab dconf-editor from the repos if you don't have it.
sudo yum install dconf-editor

Run it in a terminal
dconf-editor

Go to org > gnome > desktop > interface and check can-change-accels. This will let you dynamically change keyboard shortcuts to menu commands.

Now open up Nautilus and select a file. Open the Edit menu, hover the mouse over the Move to Trash menu item (don't press, just hover!) and hit your delete key twice (the first press disables the previous shortcut the second enables the new one).

That's it! At this point I highly recommend unchecking can-change-accels so that you don't accidently change any other shortcuts.

Courtesy of kryo.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great advice. Thank you!

Sagz said...

Works on Fedora 16 x64. thanks!

Anonymous said...

Excellent, this is going to come in handy :)

Anonymous said...

Super cool. Thanks for this trick!

Anonymous said...

Any ideas for gnome-shell 3.6.x? There's no apparent file menu...

Oliver Schmid said...

I still haven't upgraded to F18. I'll let you know when I do that and take a look at Nautilus.

Anonymous said...

As and when you do "upgrade" you will find a whole host of really annoying changes that seem to be counter-intuitive. My advice would simply install the Nemo file manager as it handles the delete key normally. In fact it does everything "normally" as Nautilus once did.

Anonymous said...

It is so sad that we have to find workarounds for things that everybody seems to hate. Also, most people won't be able to find this workaround.
:-(

Anonymous said...

Yo! Cool staff! All not so bad in this gnome 3 :)
I aplly Ctrl+D to deleting file under selection.
Ctrl+D... I used it from my first windows to nowadays.

thank you.

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