File managers are used a lot. GNOME comes with its own file manager called Files (formerly known as Nautilus) which is good enough for most operations. However, every time I do heavy work with it, there is one major feature that is missing: split view.

Split view was part of Nautilus up until version 3.6 where it was removed to reduce the complexity of the software. However, there are at least dozens of us that just work better with a split view file manager so, what's the alternative?

For me is Nemo. Nemo is the file manager that Linux Mint maintains and uses by default in its desktop environment. It is a fork of Nautilus so is similar and migrating to it is painless.

As of today my Linux distribution of choice is Fedora, so Nemo is not installed by default, as expected. Fortunately, installing it is as simple as:

$ sudo dnf install nemo-5.4.3-1.fc37.x86_64

You can install extensions to Nemo too, for example to be able to use File Roller you just do:

$ sudo dnf install nemo-fileroller-5.4.1-2.fc37.x86_64

There is one minor thing we have to fix though, there isn't any launcher to access the software we just installed. You can launch it from the terminal just typing nemo but that's not ideal for a GUI application.

To add a new icon to the GNOME launcher for Nemo, you just have to create its Desktop entry file and place it in ~/.local/share/applications.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding = UTF-8
Name = Nemo File Manager
Exec = /usr/bin/nemo
Icon = nemo
Type = Application
Categories = Development

To find the location of the Nemo executable, you can use which:

$ which nemo
/usr/bin/nemo

And that's it! Now once you are inside Nemo you can press F3 and the side panel will show up.