CASE
John download a ttf font type from the net and want to install this. He doesn’t know that nautilus has “font://” because nobody tell him and he doesn’t found any reference. So, he place is mouse cursor over the file, RMB.. “Install font” (item associated to every MIME font type usable).

This is an easy way to install fonts.
Then, another usefull tool could be a menu entry to open nautilus font:// or, as Adobe Type Manager, load different sets of fonts.

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The big problem is that you need to annotate command line utilities (especially their command line options) in a way processable by a graphical frontend. I don’t know if it will ever be possible to achieve this with a complex utility like imagemagick (where I have trouble understanding the syntax completely…)

Some of the debtags (http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/) technologies might come in handy, too.

But I’m not sure if this is prospectful.

Maybe a different approach makes more sense – writing something like the unix command line tools, but designed as plugin components for some command builder interface. Still that might be too complex for the average user, and too slow for the pro.

I pursue the same goal as you roberto. I love the power of the command line but I want to be able to do every thing throught a nice GUI and I’d really like to bring this power to the desktop. It is especially important when you try to convince people to adopt linux.

I’ve just finnish to code a nautilus extention to do exactly this kind of stuff. I based my code on the sendto extention that simply launch a little program with the selected file in parameters.

So I made a generic extention that parses xml config files where you put the informations about the program you want to launch : the name of the label in the popup menu, the name of the command and the parameters with some % like replacement string and some test information to determine when to put the menu item (file pattern (*.txt), accept files, folder or both, accept multiple files, list of accepted vfs schemes (file, sftp, smb, …))

For example if the schemes of the files selected is “sftp”, I add a “Open SSH Terminal” menu item that will launch a little expect script that will connect to ssh and change to the directory where I am in nautilus.

You can put each config in a different file so that rpm package can add there own config to integrate in nautilus automagically. And finally I wrote a python app to make configuration easier throught a nice gui.

I didn’t have the time yet to publish it, but if you find it interresting I can try to make it available quickly.

http://www.grumz.net/?q=taxonomy/term/2/9

It’d also be great to allow renaming based on metadata for e.g. mp3 files. Obviously some apps do this, but it would be nice if it were reachable from nautilus so that it felt like it “just worked”