GNOME Files, formerly and internally known as Nautilus, is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. GNOME Files, same as Nautilus, is a free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Nautilus, the predecessor of the GNOME Files, was originally developed by Eazel and Andy Hertzfeld (founder of Eazel and a former Apple engineer) in 1999. The name "Nautilus" was a play on words, evoking the shell of a nautilus to represent an operating system shell.

At the beginning of 2000, Richard Hestgray published the first screenshots of Nautilus 0.1 preview release:

In December 2000, article under the title «Nautilus, GNOME’s new file manager» was published in the Linux Magazine.

The Nautilus Desktop Shell is intended to supersede the GMC file manager (which was derived from the venerable Midnight Commander) in new versions of GNOME. What looks superficially like Yet Another File Manager appears at second glance to be a great deal more.

— Matthias Warkus, Nautilus, GNOME’s new file manager, Linux Magazine, Issue 3 (2000), C.116—119, http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/03/Nautilus.pdf

Nautilus replaced Midnight Commander in GNOME 1.4 (2001) and has been the default file manager from version 2.0 onwards. Nautilus was the flagship product of the now-defunct Eazel Inc.

GNOME Files was first released in 2001 and development has continued ever since. The following is a brief timeline of its development history: