One of the things I miss the most in GNOME is having access to many operations I still do on the command line. So, since I am not sure how all this should be implemented, I am looking for ideas for how to have access to those operations in an easy/GNOME-ish way from the GUI.
Not that I will implement all that myself, but it’s been long waiting in my notes folder, so I think I’d start sharing it for having more opinions. So, I’ve created a page on the GNOME wiki to start putting in clean all my ideas and so that other people can add their own. So please, if you have good ideas on this, please add them to that page.
Ciao Rodrigo,
an usefull script could be the one to intall a font:
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.
1 eurocent
Sorry, I can’t add it to the wiki:
Have a look at former segusoland, now LogicalDesktop.
This might be pretty close to what you are looking for.
http://logicaldesktop.sourceforge.net/
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.
I think his effort is mislead: either you simplifies the task (and then you would create another GUI applicatin for a specific task) or you complicate the interface (because to have the full flexibility of the commandline you really have to learn the commands, their switches and the way of putting them together, and at that point just typing them, with shell completion is probably the simplest possible way)
Also check out OneFinger: http://onefinger.sourceforge.net/
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.
As I didn’t find the way to edit the wiki neither, so I put my ideas here too.
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.
Frederic, yes, please, publish it, I find it interesting, although I haven’t really fully understood what it does 🙂
OK, I will try to find some time to do it. Meanwhile, I send you the source by mail in order you can test it and see if it help to achieve the goal you try to reach.
At least, I publish it. Here is its homepage :
http://www.grumz.net/?q=taxonomy/term/2/9
I also can’t seem to get logged in efficiently to use the wiki, so here’s my idea — rename. A nice efficient plugin to rename a series of selected files based on a simple rule would be excellent.
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”