The War Against Tedium In The GUI

(Reproduced from The Furtive Penguin)

Extend Your Context Menu With Nautilus-Actions

In a recent post I extolled the virtues of the command line. Today I want to suggest a tip for avoiding GUI tedium. I know that many people argue that the 'average user' is comforted by uniformity in the appearance of the desktop apps that he/she uses. We are all supposed to prefer using ONE app for the same task on a recurring basis. Personally I crave both variety and easy access to it.

Nautilus is a redoubtable file browser and I have nothing but admiration for it. Occasionally though I may want to use 'Thunar' or 'Endeavour' or marvel at the concentric ring analysis of my current file usage that 'Filelight' provides. On these occasions its nice to have simple context menu access to the appropriate app. Thanks to the wonder of 'Nautilus-Actions' this is easy to arrange.

In order to duplicate this setup you will need four packages:- thunar, filelight, endeavour2 and nautilus-actions. If you are using Ubuntu they can all be downloaded via synaptic or apt-get.

Once the nautilus-actions package has been installed you will find an icon in System --> Preferences called Nautilus Actions Configuration. Click on it and click 'Add". If you want to add the programs listed above to your right context menu simply ensure that the three configuration panels in the 'Add a New Action' panel look like the screenshots below.

Repeat three times, once for each package, and if all goes well ( difficult to see why it wouldn't ) your context menu should look something like this :-

Now you can browse folders and subfolders with four different filebrowsers simultaneously and all from the comfort of your context menu. An exercise in futility? Perhaps, but it all helps in the war against monotony on the desktop. Of course there are many other ways in which the nautilus-actions package can be used to customize the desktop, many of them no doubt, much more useful than the above.

In conclusion it should be pointed out that filelight isn't really a filebrowser, more of a sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing disk usage analyzer. But since it will let you drill down into directories and open many types of file it almost does the job. Here's a screenshot for anyone who may not be familiar with it:-