gnome-terminal made a lot of everyday tasks easier for me and the loss of it in gnome 43 is disappointing. Would love to see this functionality natively integrated in nautilus going forward.
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Do you mean the “Open in Terminal” context menu option, or something else?
For the “Open in Terminal” option you need the extension installed. Depending on your distro that may need you to install it. For example on Debian/Ubuntu I think you have to install the package nautilus-extension-gnome-terminal yourself.
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the loss of it in gnome 43 is disappointing.
That’s a bit dramatic. gnome-terminal still exists, and is actively developed by the same group of developers that worked on it for years.
All that changed is that GNOME as a projects recommends a different terminal application as default.
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Are you speaking of the terminal window integration directly inside the Nautilus window ?
That was provided by the Nautilus Terminal extension.
As stated on the README, the support has been ended since the port of Nautilus to Gtk4.
Although, don’t blame Nautilus: the author of the extension said itself Nautilus Terminal has always been a big hack of Nautilus:
It [Nautilus Terminal] hijacked existing APIs to slip into Nautilus. It used a lot of hacks to work around limitations and to work (you can read the comments in nautilus_terminal.py if you’re curious).
I am the developer of Nautilus Terminal.
As quoted by @Trim, the extension was a big hack. It was a mess and it was really difficult to maintain. Even if the LocationWidgetProvider API was added back to Nautilus, I am unsure if I would try to port the extension: it is a lot of work and it is not the right solution.
The best things to do if you want a new “Nautilus Terminal”-like extension in Nautilus is to discuss with the Nautilus devs to see what can be done to add suitable APIs for this type of extension. But I do not know how much of people are interested in it. Maybe it is just a “niche” feature.
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Sorry, used the wrong package name in my title. I am talking about nautilus-terminal, not gnome-terminal as the author earlier in this thread spoke about.
I hardly think it’s a niche feature. It’s quite nifty, especially when all you want to run is one or two commands in a directory and then exit. I realize the difficulties in porting and maintaining the package have placed it on life support for the foreseeable future.
Thank you for your “niche” project @FLOZz . I support @Amar_R’s suggestion of native integration.
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Not a nautilus-terminal user, but I came across it looking for this type of functionality. KDE has Dolphin which does have an integrated terminal that seems to work pretty well. I like gnome and the simplicity + choose your own adventure with gnome extensions. So, as mentioned before, expanding upon the APIs that Nautilus offers to gnome extensions could be the best bet. I’m a fan of Wezterm, so the opportunity for extension developers to offer different terminal experiences in Nautilus would be neat.
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Say you have a terminal (i.e. a separate app) that can communicate with Nautilus (e.g. change location), then what would be the issues compared to an integrated terminal? Maybe that will help.
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I like this idea. It needs a new API for extensions to know the current location.
It needs APIs to:
- Add widgets to a panel inside every tabs
- Know current location (tab-based)
- Know when location changed (tab-based)
- Add global accels (to toggle the terminal)
- (Know active tab of the window (to show/hide the terminal of the currently displayed tab))
I was referring to Michaël’s suggestion of keeping a terminal window in sync with a nautilus window, which is a clever way to avoid the need for most of these. In particular, a generic API for injecting arbitrary GtkWidgets into nautilus windows is something I want to stay away from.
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Thanks!
The original idea come from Saad: Tilling Windows New Concept (#48) · Issues · Teams / Design / Whiteboards · GitLab
In this same issue, I had already given the example for Files + Console/terminal (Tilling Windows New Concept (#48) · Issues · Teams / Design / Whiteboards · GitLab).
The advantages of this:
- The terminal can be resized without affecting the view of Files.
- The terminal can be placed anywhere relative to Files
A big disadvantage: Files and the terminal can’t be moved together.
Maybe discussing the user experience in a separate topic?
Coming from windows, this extension for nautilus was such a nice feature, I can’t believe I will have to live without it. I have to agree with maverick97, it’s hardly a niche feature and it really makes life easier. It would be amazing though if it was to be either part of the official package or got more API support as to make it easier to maintain.
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Hi,
currently I’m using nautilus-extension-gnome-terminal but it would be really good to have the ability to set a key binding short cut for “Open Terminal here”. Maybe you can consider it when implementing this feature?
Hey Martin, afaik that is the extension to open a terminal via right click, correct? This thread is about the direct embedding of a terminal into the nautilus window.
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