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Linux Desktop Hacks
book

Linux Desktop Hacks

by Nicholas Petreley, Jono Bacon
March 2005
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
342 pages
15h 55m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Linux Desktop Hacks
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Chapter 6, GNOME Desktop Hacks
#47 Create Your Own GNOME Right-Click Actions
HACK
HACK
#47
Create Your Own GNOME Right-Click Actions Hack #47
Create custom menu actions in the Nautilus file manager.
GNOME and its file manager, Nautilus, have a custom menu feature simi-
lar to KDE/Konqueror. This hack shows you how to exploit that Nautilus
feature, add your own menu selections, and get around some of the limita-
tions of Nautilus.
The Nautilus approach and the KDE approach to adding custom menu
selections differ in that you can’t make the Nautilus menu selections con-
text-sensitive so that they appear only when they would be useful. This
means you can create menu actions that are useless in the wrong context.
For example, there’s no reason why you would want to click a spreadsheet
and then select “convert to PNG image” from a custom menu. Yet, if you
create a script that converts a file to a PNG image, that menu option (along
with all the other script menu selections you have created) will appear even
when you select files where such a conversion would be nonsense.
The only way to make a script context-sensitive is to associate the script
with a type of file by using the GNOME File Types and Programs applet.
After that, the script will appear as one of the ways to “Open” the file.
Figure 6-2. Two gDesklets on the GNOME desktop
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009119Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata