I always used compact view in Nautilus because I hate big icons and the list view doesn't let you extract archives conveniently by dragging and dropping files onto the free space (because there's no free space!) and it generally looks slower when scrolling.

Now they have removed the Compact Mode in new Nautilus:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676842

http://git.gnome.org/browse/nautilus/commit/?id=241e462024070d9f79f4816256fc00ff5119e25f

and that guy says:

There is really little difference between compact mode and icon mode
with labels on the side. Well, except for that that horrible
horizontal scrolling.

So the question is then: how do I make icon labels on the side?