I worry that you're still using Nautilus 3.6, which was definitely an interim version of Nautilus. If you check out 3.8, you'll see that type-ahead search is ve

I worry that you're still using Nautilus 3.6, which was definitely an interim version of Nautilus. If you check out 3.8, you'll see that type-ahead search is very much there, and better than ever — especially if you happen to have Tracker installed :) The key difference is it's effectively a file search that is easy to back out of, so it only shows files that match your input. Personally, I find that makes it a lot easier to flip between a bunch of files with similar names, and it's making me really like search — which I had never really used before. It'll search recursively, but the files from the current folder are listed first, so it's harder to get lost among them than it sounds. (And I think there might be something on the roadmap to list files from the current folder and from elsewhere under a separate heading, but I could be mixing that up with something else).