GNOME Files Bookmarks and Network Mounts Guide

GNOME Files (also known as Nautilus) provides an intuitive sidebar for quick navigation across local directories, external devices, and remote servers. This article explains how GNOME Files manages user-defined bookmarks and persistent network mount locations, detailing the underlying technologies like GTK bookmark files and the GVfs virtual filesystem that keep your locations accessible across user sessions.

Managing Local and Remote Bookmarks

GNOME Files manages user-created shortcuts through the GTK bookmarks system. When you drag a folder into the sidebar or press Ctrl + D on an open directory, the application appends that location to a plain text file located at:

~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks

Each entry in this file consists of a URI and an optional custom label. Because this file belongs to the shared GTK configuration, bookmarks created in GNOME Files immediately appear in the file chooser dialogs of other GTK applications across your desktop environment.

You can reorder, rename, or remove bookmarks directly through the sidebar context menu (right-click) or by manually editing the bookmarks configuration file.

Handling Network Mount Locations via GVfs

Network connections in GNOME Files rely on GVfs (GNOME Virtual file system), an abstraction layer that enables users to mount remote protocols such as SFTP, SMB/CIFS, WebDAV, NFS, and FTP directly in user space.

When you connect to a server via Other Locations > Connect to Server, the following process takes place:

  1. User-Space Mounting: GVfs authenticates and establishes the remote connection. The remote share is mounted in user space without requiring root privileges and exposed locally under /run/user/$UID/gvfs/.
  2. Dynamic Sidebar Appearance: While active, the mounted share automatically appears in the sidebar under the network section, accompanied by an "unmount" or "eject" icon.
  3. Session Persistence: By default, standard GVfs network mounts are ephemeral. When you log out or reboot, the connection terminates, and the dynamic mount disappears from the active sidebar list.

Making Network Mounts Persistent in the Sidebar

To make remote network locations easily accessible across reboots, GNOME Files provides two distinct methods:

1. Bookmarking GVfs Remote URIs

The simplest way to retain access to a network share is to bookmark it while connected:

  • Connect to the server using its URI (e.g., sftp://user@server.local/share).
  • Once mounted, right-click the remote folder or the sidebar entry and select Add to Bookmarks.
  • The network URI is written to ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks.

Even after a system reboot—when the share is not actively mounted—the bookmark remains permanently visible in the sidebar. Clicking the bookmarked remote entry triggers GNOME Files and GVfs to automatically reconnect and re-mount the location on demand, retrieving credentials from GNOME Keyring if previously saved.

2. Using System-Level Mounts (/etc/fstab)

For network shares that must be mounted automatically at system boot rather than on-demand inside the file manager:

  • Configure the mount point in /etc/fstab using protocols such as NFS or CIFS.
  • Include the x-gvfs-show mount option in the configuration line.
  • The x-gvfs-show flag explicitly instructs GNOME Files to display the system-level mount point in the sidebar, providing seamless integration for permanent, system-wide network drives.