How to hide side panel in Nautilus by default?

Question

Is there any setting that allows me to hide left side panel on Nautilus by default?

I know it remembers the setting during the user session but I still have to hide it every time I login.

Answer 1

There is a setting for it in 14.04, but I am not sure about 16.10. Nautilus has changed a lot in recent years.

Try

gsettings get org.gnome.nautilus.window-state start-with-sidebar

the output should be true, when the sidebar is visible, or false, when not.

To hide the sidebar, run

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.window-state start-with-sidebar false

Needless to say, it should now be trivial to unhide it:

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.window-state start-with-sidebar true

Answer 2

Just additional info based on @mikewhatever's answer if somebody wants quick toggle solution. You can create following bash script:

#!/bin/bash
ISON="$(gsettings get org.gnome.nautilus.window-state start-with-sidebar)";
if [ "$ISON" = true ]; then
    gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.window-state start-with-sidebar false;
else
    gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.window-state start-with-sidebar true;
fi

Then make it executable and you can create alias in `~/.bash_aliases' as following:

alias nsp='~/path/to/created/file/nautilus-sidepanel.sh'

Instead of nsp you can name it whatever you want (of course no spaces etc), then after saving it, run source ~/.bashrc in terminal. After that you can toggle the nautilus side panel just by running nsp command.

You can also create custom keyboard shortcut just by placing the link to the file as a command.