By the way, you ought to try Nautilus 3 because the sidebar is
arranged differently now. While you'd probably still need to select
File System for what you're wanting to do, there is no Computer button
to confuse you. Of course, the Nautilus developers aren't going to
make design changes to Nautilus 2; if you're going to report a design
bug, you ought to be using at least the latest stable version of the
software, if not the development version.
Jeremy Bicha
I hadn't thought of that Jeremy, maybe it will be a bit clearer in Gnome 3. I still think that when I want to search for a file that could be anywhere there is a fundamental problem. At the moment, no search feature I can find on Natty operates centrally or encompasses all filesystems.
If nautilus design is out of the hands of developers / designers here then it should be addressed at the unity level. I've been reading about Lenses. I think instead of having to add a lens to have full search functionality, the existing search could be improved in the following way:
1) I choose from Unity launcher to search "Files & Folders".
2) I type "Very Old Document.odt" (which is stored on a seperate disk mounted as /media/Backups with the label "Backups")
3) Instead of only being told "Your seach did not match any files.", you could in this case append the message with "Would you like to search the entire computer?" or "Did you mean 'Very Old Document.odt' from the disk labelled 'Backups'?".
Jarlath