Organising Files

Being able to organise your files is essential if you want to be able to find your files again. This page will go through how to create folders, move and rename files, and generally how to keep everything in order.

Where Is Everything?

Ubuntu (in much the same way as Windows does) has a “main” folder which stores everything you create or download. This main folder is called Home, and can be opened by clicking on the File Manager icon (shown on the right). The Home folder contains some pre-created folders to help you organise your files:

Documents is the place to store your … documents!
Music, Pictures, Videos and Desktop are fairly self-explanatory
Downloads is the default location for any downloads
Public is a folder to put files that you want other users on the computer to be able to access

As you can see from my Home folder, you can set up your own folders if you want as well in Home. However, for simplicity you are probably better off to simply use the folders that Ubuntu gives you to start with.Navigating

You can open a folder by simply double-clicking on it, and the window will now show the folder contents. The important place to look is at the top of the window, as this will show you where the folder you are currently looking at is located. Here is the “breadcrumb trail” after I’ve opened a few folders:

You can see here that I opened up the School folder, then the TH101 folder. I can navigate back up the containing folders by either using the two arrows on the left, or simply clicking on the name of a folder in the breadcrumb trail. For instance, if I click on Documents I get this:

You can see that the Documents “button” is pushed in, showing that this is the current folder. You can also use the locations (Bookmarks) on the left-hand side of the window to navigate around your files.

Creating Folders

To make your own folders, you can either:

Right-click in the window background and choose New Folder; or
Go to the File menu in the top-left of the screen and choose New Folder; or
Press Shift-Ctrl-N

All of these will give you a new folder named Untitled Folder ready for you to rename to whatever you wish.

Renaming Files

To rename a file, the easiest way is to right-click on the file, and choose “Rename...”

You can now type a new name and press Enter:

Moving Files

To move a file from one folder to another, there are a few options available for you.

Cut and Paste

If you click on a file, you can “Cut” it using Ctrl-X, or right-click on the file and choose Cut. You can then navigate to the new folder and “Paste” it with Ctrl-V or right-click in the window background and choose Paste.

Drag and Drop

If you want to move a file to a folder in the current window, you can simply drag-and-drop the file onto the folder. If you hold the file over the folder without releasing the mouse button, the folder will open and you can out the file wherever you like.

Move To

If you right-click on a file, you can choose the Move To… option. This brings up a new Destination window, allowing you to choose where to move the file to.

You can now choose a folder to move the file into, as well as creating a new folder to move the file into using the button on the top-right. A few notes about using this feature:

You always “start” in the folder where the file currently resides
You will also note that, even though Home is highlighted on the left pane, the breadcrumb trail at the top says dave. This is because your Home folder is actually called by your username, but most of the time you never see this.
When you have navigated to where you want the file to be, click the Select button at the bottom-right.

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