How to add or remove Places entries in Nautilus

[ Before and after look of my Places menu. ]

The Places feature in Ubuntu is similar to the Favorites in Windows. The folders inside it appear in the Places dropdown on the Ubuntu taskbar, in the rightpane of Nautilus (the file manager) and in the right pane of any Open dialog of any Ubuntu application. I find the default folders in Places cluttered and useless. I have no use for the default folders (like Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos and Downloads) since my organization is different and is placed elsewhere. So, I like to remove most of the Default folders and add some frequently accessed folders (like Dropbox).

In Ubuntu 14.04

In recent versions of Ubuntu, adding or removing these entries is a bit complicated than before.

The entries are populated in Nautilus from the ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs file. Open this file and add or delete the entries that you want.

However, this file is overwritten from scratch by the xdg-user-dirs-update program every time you log into the system. To stop this overwriting to protect the add or delete of entries, you request it in the file ~/.config/user-dirs.conf:

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

By creating this new file, you are overriding the settings in the global /etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf file.

After you have done these changes, either restart Nautilus or log out and log back in. You will see your changed entries in Nautilus.

In Ubuntu 12.04

To remove a folder from Places: Open Nautilus. In the right pane of Places, right-click the folder you want to remove and choose Remove.

To add a folder to Places: Open Nautilus. Go to the folder that contains the folder you want to add to Places. Drag the folder you want to the right pane under Places.

All the folders added or removed are automatically refreshed to the Places taskbar menu and all Open dialogs.