How to enable movable item selection in multiple rows Icon View with keyboard arrow keys in Caja?

[Norbert_X]

On my Ubuntu MATE 16.04.5 LTS I'm using Caja 1.12.7 (1.12.7-1ubuntu0.1) as file-manager.
I do not have MATE-related PPAs in my system.

I like Caja's Icon View mode.

Let's consider that I have navigated to /, then I select first item by mouse and start to press right keyboard arrow (→) key to move selection from the left to the right.
As the result the selection moves to the end of the current horizontal row of icons and does not move to next row:

Is this expected behavior?

If I try the same method on Windows Explorer, I can move selection between icon rows by pressing ← or → repeatedly.

If I remember correctly I have seen some 16.04 MATE LTS where this functionality was implemented as I expect.

On 18.04 LTS this behavior exists out the box:

How can I customize Caja to act as I need in 16.04 LTS?

[Bill_MI]

Hi @Norbert_X, I’m sorry to report my VMs confirm exactly as you so accurately describe (nice GIFs!).

I can confirm the PPA taking 16.04 MATE from 1.12 to 1.16 does change it as you would like. I haven’t heard of anyone applying this PPA recently but I’m still running with it since 2016.

To give it the best shot I went snooping around dconf settings and found no magic bullets, either.