One minute hacks: the nautilus scripts folder

Master SDN hacker Flavio sent me some tunes. They were sitting on my desktop in a folder:

$ ls ~/Desktop/
uncopyrighted_tunes_from_flavio/

I wanted to listen them while hacking, but what was the easiest way…? I wanted to use the nautilus file browser to select which folder to play, and the totem music/video player to do the playing.

Drop a file named totem into:

~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/

with the contents:

#!/bin/bash
# o hai from purpleidea
exec totem -- "$@"

and make it executable with:

$ chmod u+x ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/totem

Now right-click on that music folder in nautilus, and you should see a Scripts menu. In it there will be a totem menu item. Clicking on it should load up all the contents in totem and you’ll be rocking out in no time. You can also run scripts with a selection of various files.

Here’s a screenshot:

nautilus is pretty smart and even lets you know that this folder is special

I wrote this to demonstrate a cute nautilus hack. Hopefully you’ll use this idea to extend this feature for something even more useful.

Happy hacking,

James

 

learn how to do one minute hacks, in three minutes

I write this technical blog for you to enjoy, and to help me remember. So where do I get all this knowledge? I figure it out! Here’s how I learned to fix a small gedit annoyance in one minute, and within the next three, you’ll be able to do the same for other types of problems too. Ready? Set? Go!

I use gedit enough, that when I hack, I often end up using up more than the five allotted spaces in the “recent files” sections. I wanted to see eight. Since I knew it would have been silly for the developers to hard code the number five, I decided there was a chance that they stored it in the dconf settings. (BTW, there’s also an amazing “Dashboard” plugin which I use for more complex recent-files searching…)

Enter dconf-editor. Run this, and start browsing through the hierarchy. You’ll notice that the org.gnome.* hierarchy has a lot going on. Look around, and you’ll find a “gedit” section. Once there, you’ll probably recognize some of the key names, as preferences you’ve seen. I searched for the number 5 and I found it next to a ‘max-recents’ key.

You can edit this with the editor, or for your convenience, just run:

gsettings set org.gnome.gedit.preferences.ui max-recents 8

the corresponding ‘read’ command is:

gsettings get org.gnome.gedit.preferences.ui max-recents

of course. The interesting thing about these settings, is that if coded properly, their actions are “live”. Which means, you can toggle them on and off, and in most cases, you’ll see the results immediately. Similarly, if you toggle a particular setting in gedit, you should see the changes instantly in dconf-editor.

Have fun playing with this and,

Happy hacking,

James