I moved by work development environment to Fedora 34 recently. I want to capture some tools that I found useful on this journey. I use GNOME 40 flavor. I had used GNOME a few years ago and remember not being very impressed. If you felt the same, try GNOME 40! Least to say that I am very happy with the experience and only use my macbook pro for video/audio production and live streaming.

Nautilus is the default file explorer or finder of Gnome. It is also called Files. It provides a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system. This is what the default UI looks like:

I have ohmyzsh installed in my shell and find the Git information like branch, etc very helpful.

I was looking for a similar experience in Nautilus. Yes, real developers use UI sometimes :). I use the CLI heavily for my Git tasks, but it would be really nice to see some Git information in Files when I do have it open for whatever reason, like uploading files. I found the following two extensions for this purpose:

1. RabbitVCS
2. nautilus-git

RabbitVCS

This extension adds a menu to Nautilus and provides multiple UI tools for interacting with Git

nautilus-git

This extension is even simpler. It provides a way to switch branches from Nautilus itself. I use it to just see where I am in the branch system.

What are some of your favorite GNOME tools?