Nemo: The Linux Mint Team Forks Nautilus

After Cinnamon, Muffin and MDM, the Linux Mint team works on yet another fork: Nemo, a file manager forked from Nautilus 3.4.x.

Nautilus 3.5.x, which will become Nautilus 3.6 stable and will be a part of GNOME 3.6, has got a new toolbar and menubar, but there were also some features that were removed, like the dual pane feature, sidebar tree view and others. And this, it seems, wasn't what the Linux Mint developers want for their users, so they've decided to fork Nautilus 3.4.x, which still has these features.

For now, there are only a couple of visible changes between Nautilus 3.4.2 and Nemo:

• the location entry is visible by default, but it doesn't replace the breadcrumbs - it's displayed under the breadcrumb, and the user can easily show/hide it from the View menu or by using the CTRL + L keyboard shortcut.
• some minor changes have been made to the look and feel - for instance, the sidebar uses a white background

On the Nemo todo list are various fixes, make it easier for the user to define mime actions, improved look and feel and it's also possible for the view buttons to be re-added.

Since it seems the Mint team wants to make Nautilus more usable and prettier, I wonder why they haven't tried to port some, if not all the Nautilus elementary patches to Nautilus 3.4.x, since the goals are basically the same. But since the work on Nemo has started only two weeks ago, there's still a lot of work to be done so we'll see if the Nautilus elementary concepts will be integrated or if the Linux Mint team wants to go its own way.

The Nemo file manager source can be downloaded via GitHub.

Thanks to Brian Bentsen for the tip!