Nemo 3.4 With Unity Patches And Without Cinnamon Dependencies Available In New PPA For Ubuntu

Update: the article initially mentioned Nemo 3.2. The PPA now provides Nemo 3.4 for Ubuntu 17.04 and 16.04 (Ubuntu 16.10 is no longer supported by Canonical, so Launchpad doesn't allow uploading new packages for it).

To make it easy to go back to Nemo 2.8.0 for Ubuntu 16.04 users in case something doesn't work properly (because there were quite a few under the hood changes in Nemo), I decided to upload the latest Nemo 3.4 to a new PPA.

For those not familiar with Nemo, this is the default Cinnamon file manager, forked from the old Nautilus 3.4. Nemo features include:

• dual pane (can be enabled from the View menu or using the F3 key)
• unified, configurable toolbar (you can show or hide the up, next, home, open in terminal, new folder, search button and more);
• built-in actions, scripts and extensions manager;
• treeview sidebar option;
• re-worked statusbar with zoom controls, free space info, as well as options to toggle displaying the places sidebar, treeview or completely hide the sidebar;
• the main toolbar, menubar, and statusbar can be hidden;
• built-in "Open as root" and "Open in terminal" context menu items;
• "Set as Wallpaper" context menu for images;
• sidebar: indicators under each drive, displaying the free/used space;
• improved the Open With dialog;
• option to resize individual desktop icons;
• much more.

Nemo 3.2.0 with two panes and plugin manager

Nemo has received quite a few improvements since version 2.8.x (which is available in the WebUpd8 Nemo PPA), such as:

• option to choose on which monitor to show the desktop folder (icons). This can be changed via Dconf Editor (org > nemo > desktop > desktop-layout), and can be set to show desktop icons on primary monitor, on remaining monitors, or on all monitors (default is primary only).
• fixed wrong desktop size with GTK 3.20;
• re-enabled desktop type-to-select feature;
• option to double-click empty area to go to parent directory (can be enabled in the Nemo Preferences, under Behavior);
• only append .desktop to desktop files when they actually need it. Trusted desktop files (ones that typically get made and placed on the desktop) don't show their extension, so when you try to rename them, the new name needs .desktop appended to it;
• many other improvements and bug fixes.

See some of the changes in Nemo 3.4 HERE.

For a complete Nemo changelog, see THIS page.

This PPA provides Nemo without Cinnamon dependencies (well, one is needed for translations: cinnamon-l10n, and is provided by the PPA) and with Unity patches, such as Unity Launcher quicklists and progress bar support, GNOME / Unity Control Center support, patch to draw the desktop background (wallpaper), and various other minor tweaks / fixes for Unity.

While Nemo from this PPA is patched for Unity, it should work with other desktop environments as well, like GNOME (Shell) or Xfce, although I didn't test it.

Install Nemo 3 with Unity patches and without Cinnamon dependencies in 17.04 or 16.04

Important: do not use this PPA if you use Linux Mint or if you use the Cinnamon desktop in Ubuntu! Also, if you've added any Cinnamon PPAs, you'll have to purge them before using this Nemo PPA.

To add the Nemo 3 PPA (new PPA; the old WebUpd8 Nemo PPA still has Nemo 2.8.x!) and install Nemo with Unity patches and without Cinnamon dependencies, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/nemo3
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nemo

To install Nemo extensions, you can either search for "nemo" in Synaptic, or install them via command line - you can find the available extensions HERE.

Important: if you're upgrading from an older Nemo version and you had Nemo set to draw the desktop, you'll have to either logout/login or run "nemo-desktop" manually. This is only required once after updating - that's because the executable used to draw the desktop is now "nemo-desktop" instead of "nemo".

Optional: set Nemo as the default file manager

To set Nemo as the default file manager (including setting Nemo to manage the desktop), use the following commands:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons false
xdg-mime default nemo.desktop inode/directory application/x-gnome-saved-search

(the first command above disables Nautilus from handling the desktop, and the second command sets Nemo as the default app to open directories)

Then restart the session (logout/login) and you're done!

How to revert the changes

To revert the changes, use Nautilus to draw the desktop instead of Nemo:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons true

And set Nautilus back as the default file manager:

xdg-mime default nautilus.desktop inode/directory application/x-gnome-saved-search

To remove the PPA and all the Nemo packages (including the Nemo extensions), use:

sudo apt remove nemo nemo-*
sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/webupd8team-nemo-*.list