Many users have expressed disappointment with recent changes to Nautilus (GNOME’s default file manager), particularly regarding the Places sidebar customization1. This is especially frustrating when you need custom locations, such as when your files are stored on external drives - and simple bookmarks just won’t suffice2. Here’s a quick guide to reclaim control of your Places sidebar:

Step 1: Edit the User Directories Configuration

Using your preferred text editor, add a list of the other locations you’d like to have listed to the user-dirs config file:

nano ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

Step 2: Make Changes Permanent

The changes from the previous step will disappear upon reboot. To prevent this, add the following to the file:

echo "enabled=false" > ~/.config/user-dirs.conf

(Remember to use absolute paths in the configuration file.)

Note: After making these changes, you might need to restart Nautilus for them to take effect. You can do this by running nautilus -q in the terminal

And there you go - your “Places” are Yours again! This solution works across different Linux distributions using the GNOME desktop environment.

  1. How can I edit Nautilus Places sidebar and Unity quicklist? ↩︎

  2. How do I remove Places entries from the Nautilus sidebar? ↩︎