A very important part of a complete desktop environment is the interface to the user's files. This interface is offered by Nautilus, which provides the desktop icons and filesystem windows for GNOME. Using the right mouse button, common operations such as Open/Delete/Copy/Move can be performed, the properties of the desktop icons and files (such as permissions, icons, labels, and such) can be changed, and file-specific tasks can be started. The filesystem windows offer a variety of Views (tree, icon and listview) as well as file searching and selection. Drag and Drop is fully supported, providing the user with an intuitive method of file manipulation.
On a programming level, the developer is available to talk to the file manager via a CORBA interface to ask it to create new windows for specific directories, and close these windows. Custom views can be created using a decent Bonobo interface.