How to Sort Hard Drives in the GNOME Files (Nautilus) Sidebar

ByPriya Nair

Labels still work for names — just not for sort order

If you’ve been naming drives in GNOME Disks to force alphabetical ordering in the Nautilus sidebar, that trick stopped working reliably around GNOME 46. The label still shows up as the display name, but the order drives appear in the sidebar is now decided lower in the stack — by the udisks2 daemon — not by the label string itself.

Why it broke

Nautilus doesn’t talk to disks directly. It gets volume objects from GIO, which are populated by GVfs’s udisks2 volume monitor. That monitor watches udisks2, which reads device metadata from the kernel via udev.

At some point GVfs stopped using the filesystem label as the primary sort key when building GVolume objects. The ordering now comes from device identifiers — a drive’s world-wide name, detection sequence, and similar properties — none of which you can change by relabeling a partition in GNOME Disks. There’s an open work item on the Nautilus GitLab tracker about modernizing the sidebar places UI (#577). As of mid-2026, nothing has landed.

Workaround 1: GTK bookmarks for manual ordering

This is the fastest fix available right now. Mount your drives, then drag each one from the “Drives” section in the sidebar up into the “Bookmarks” section. Bookmarks are reorderable by dragging, and the order persists across sessions.

The bookmarks file lives at ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks. Each line is a URI with an optional display label after a space:

file:///mnt/data A_Data
file:///mnt/backup B_Backup
file:///mnt/media C_Media

You can edit this file directly with a text editor to get exact ordering without any dragging. Entries for drives that are not yet mounted will activate automatically when the drive appears. One catch: drives will still show under “Drives” as well, so you get some duplication in the sidebar. For multi-drive setups the trade-off is usually worth it.

Workaround 2: the udisks2 SortKey config file

udisks2 has a per-drive configuration mechanism that almost nobody uses. It involves creating an ini-style file at /etc/udisks2/IDENTIFIER.conf, where IDENTIFIER is the value of the drive’s Id property.

Find the identifier first:

udisksctl info -b /dev/sdX | grep " Id:"

Then create the configuration file:

[drive]
SortKey=01_primary_data

The SortKey field is part of the org.freedesktop.UDisks2.Drive interface, described in the udisks2 reference manual as “a string that can be used for sorting drive objects.” Whether Nautilus and GVfs actually honor this value depends on how GVfs maps udisks2 drive properties to GVolume sort keys in your specific installed version. It’s documented, it requires no filesystem changes, and it’s low-risk to test — try it before reaching for anything heavier.

What’s open upstream

Two relevant issues are tracked on the GNOME/Files GitLab: one about modernizing sidebar places (#577) and one specifically about grouping partitions by disk in the sidebar (#3450). Neither has shipped a fix yet. A comment or a thumbs-up reaction on those issues is the highest-leverage thing a regular user can do — the GNOME maintainers do read them and comment counts matter when prioritizing work.

If you need more control today

Nemo — the file manager shipped with Linux Mint, available in most major distro repos — is a fork of an older Nautilus codebase and gives significantly more sidebar control. It runs fine on a GNOME desktop and can be set as the default without removing Nautilus. Dolphin, KDE’s file manager, is another strong choice for multi-drive setups and installs as a standalone app on any distro.

Sources


Similar Posts