nautilus does not open a new window when opening a folder in a browser

Applications
1

anim

Is there a way to make it open a new window instead of a focused window?

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Hi there, I am not aware of any way around this, it’s nautilus way of preventing too many open windows. What is the issue with focusing an open window?

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FWIW, nautilus has the following option to open URI in new window.

-w, --new-window  Always open a new window for browsing specified URIs

But web browsers don’t directly call nautilus, but the default file manager (which can also be thunar / nemo etc) set in the system. But, it shouldn’t be difficult to achieve what you’re trying to do.

2 Likes
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Thanks Sid, I didn’t know how to get the browser to pass this option to nautilus.

❯ xdg-mime query default inode/directory
org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop
❯ cat /usr/share/applications/org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop | grep Exec
Exec=nautilus --new-window %U
Exec=nautilus --new-window
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Launching nautilus from command line and launching nautilus via D-Bus (from web browser) are 2 different things.

  1. The former is a simple direct command launch. Refer nautilus-application.c for more details.
  2. The later involves mime type processing and selecting 1 app from apps supporting the freedesktop.org File Manager DBus Interface. Refer nautilus-freedesktop-dbus.c for more details.

It appears that nautilus does not open a new window for the same URI when launched via [2], though this always works with [1]. This might be a conscious decision to not launch too many windows which might clutter the desktop. In most cases, it makes perfect sense.

If you’d like to always open a new window, I’d look into discussions in this recent thread. I would create a wrapper shell script around nautilus if necessary.

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