The Nautilus program in GNOME is not only the default file manager, it creates and manages the desktop. While it looks simple on the surface, there is a lot of hidden power under the shell. The latest version of Nautilus is 2.14.0, which is included in Fedora Core 5. That's the one I poked with a stick.
Nautilus has something of a colorful past. It was created by a company called Eazel, staffed by ex-Apple programmers that wanted to bring ease of use to the Linux desktop. A noble goal. I remember the early versions were beautiful, buggy and dog slow. Eazel burned through it's VC money and closed shop, but set the Nautilus code free. GNOME adopted the code and morphed it into the Nautilus of today. It is still beautiful, but now solid and reasonably quick.
You can still see vestiges of the Mac Finder in Nautilus from the rotating triangles that open a folder in tree view, the meta information that is stored about each directory, and the hidden trash directories that are created on each volume where you dare move a file to the trash. The visual touches are appealing; the droppings not so much. On with the list...
