Thursday, December 30, 2010

Better navigation options in Nautilus context menus

Am I the only one who is so used to the 'Right Click' + 'Back' option on Browsers that he keeps creating untitled folders everywhere in Nautilus?

Context menu in Nautilus 2.32.0
However, on a browser, it is the more convenient 'Back' option:

Context menu in Chrome (almost the same for Firefox and Internet Explorer too)



I submitted this idea to the Ubuntu Brainstorm. However, it seems that people will not like modifying the context menu a lot. There is, nevertheless, a suggestions about including something akin to mouse gestures in Nautilus.

Do you have any interesting ideas/suggestions/opinions?

Update:


Somewhat inspired by this idea, I have proposed another solution: allowing custom menu items just like Thunar does:
Adding a custom menu item in the context menu (in Thunar)
A hack I can see here is using a nautilus-client much like rhythmbox-client (which I have used with some satisfaction), and using it like:

  • nautilus-client --back
  • nautilus-client --forward
  • nautilus-client --refresh
  • nautilus-client --bookmark 2
  • ... etc.

The only problem I see here is that Nautilus can have multiple instances running at the same time, so the nautilus-client will need to figure out which is the active Nautilus window (which has focus). I am not sure whether there is a cross-platform way of knowing which window has focus. Is there?

~
musically_ut

2 comments:

Aryä said...

Seems a slow way to get there. Not really a suggestion. An opinion, maybe.

musically_ut said...

@Arya: Still perhaps better than going to the top-left corner of the screen and clicking the back icon. Or going back to the keyboard and pressing 'Alt+Back_arrow'