As most of you know, you can switch between the visual location entry, and the text based one in Nautilus, by hitting Ctrl+L.
When I tried to set this value permanently in gconf-editor, it doesn't exist. When I tried to do it via the terminal, this is the message that I receive:
No value to set for key: /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry
I can still switch between the two via the Ctrl+L, but I'm stumped about the fix.
If you want to toggle between location bar or path bar without installing anything on your system open a terminal and type to enable the location bar
gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences always-use-location-entry true
and to disable it
gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences always-use-location-entry false
This setting is user based. You may need to restart Nautilus with nautilus -q.
The method is applicable for all current releases:
Answer edited out of the question
To permanently switch from path bar to location bar, you can use dconf-tools 
.
To install dconf-tools, run the following command in a terminal:
sudo apt-get install dconf-tools
After installing it, search for dconf-tools in the dash and open it.
From there, the setting is located at org -> gnome -> nautilus -> preferences.
You need to enable always-use-location-entry to always use the location toolbar instead of the path bar.
