GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 72715
Nautilus provides no way to add application launchers to the panel menus
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Testing gnome2 i've noticed that nautilus is going to be used as the menu editor. However it is impossible to add application launchers to the menu through nautilus. The only way currently to do this is to create a launcher on the panel and than drag it into nautilus. This is counterintuitive and bad and must be fixed. Marking this blocker since gnome2 shouldn't even ship if this isn't fixed.
Marking Urgent, since bordoley is mainly right- this really, really must be fixed before we ship g2. Not sure it is really a nautilus bug, though. Darin: note that this is probably something falling under the 'not a regression but still 1.2 related' category, as far as I can see, since this new functionality was sort-of-added to nautilus but not really. Please feel free to change if you disagree.
I'm on it. I'll make an external program in the panel that allows editting .desktop's and .directories, and install a mime-handler for those. And include buttons for creation of new .desktop's on the sidebar for such directories. Or some such. (or so is the plan) Optimal solution would be to have support directly in nautilus, and I think we should think about making a specialized view for this as well.
Just noticed that panel does supply a program to create launchers on the panel, could this be used in nautilus too?
*** Bug 43264 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 76653 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 43269 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Why don't we just use the "create launcher" binary from the panel to create launchers and use the "launcher properties" binary from the panel to edit launchers properties? If needed we could move these two binaries to a more generic gnome library (maybe gnomeUI, I don't know too much about this). Should be easy I would assume.
bug 75979 is sort of a dup of this; perhaps a complete dup. Not sure; depends on how that one is interpreted. George, what's the situation here? This is a /huge/ problem for 2.0 right now :/
The following gnome-vfs bugs relate to the same issues 73768 nor Nor jirka@5z.com NEW New folder in applications:/// is getting the name "untitled 73773 nor Nor jirka@5z.com NEW Cannot rename items in applications:/// 73769 nor Nor jirka@5z.com NEW Deleted folders in applications:/// don't disappear. 73770 nor Nor jirka@5z.com NEW Drag and Drop fails to add menu items to applications:///
*** Bug 61080 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 78075 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 75979 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Thanks for digging those up, Mike. Adding those to the dependencies of this bug.
Doh. Meant to mark those 'depends on' not 'blocks.'
Not sure if I caught all the related bugs - they could be posted on several packages under several descriptions, as with the above.
Not sure if I caught all the related bugs - they could be posted on several packages under several descriptions, as with the above. add 76180 74719 to the list
Mike: I'm thinking maybe bug 76180 should just be merged into this one, since it already has some of those types of details?
agreed - at least we now have most of these bugs in the same place now
adding bugbuddy tag
*** Bug 76180 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 79181 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 79714 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
i've been looking today at this bug, i didn't get very far. This are the things that i saw: the vfolder-desktop method in general does not unscape the uris. to move items between directories: as the vfolder-desktop method doesn't support file permissions, nautilus tries to check whether it can write in the target directory by writing a test file .vfs-write.tmp, as the extension of the file is not .desktop or .directory, the do_create function of the vfolder method return "Invalid URI". Moving/renaming whole directories is quite difficult, i took a look at the code but didn't get very far. Maybe George could put some light on this. I'm really tired of this thing, maybe in a week i'll give it another try.
Workaround/ideas for solution I have posted to list along these lines but you can do menu editing from command line as follows. Copy a .desktop file for the menu item you want and edit to reflect new entry. All you need to change is application name icon category To create new category edit /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/vfolders/applications registry (I think) amend text in file - fairly easy to follow layout
I'm currently working on a nautilus patch to add items to menus. The overall idea is: Change the mime type of the vfolder directory from x-directory/normal to x-directory/vfolder-desktop. Then in the fm-directory-view.c file I check if it is this mime/type and if so show a New Launcher and Edit Launcher items. Unfortinately this does add a few strings
George, any idea when your patch might be ready?
When I get my alpha to get that far in the compile and I can debug it. I could send you my patch which I have not even compiled yet.
Hmm, doesn't look like I'll get it done today. Hopefully during the weekend.
Ok since I won't be able to finish it right now, here are the untested patches to gnome-vfs and nautilus. If someone wants to finish it make sure to reply to this bug. I probably won't get much of a chance to look at this throughout the weekend so ... they're not long patches, but completely untested
Created attachment 8715 [details] [review] Untested gnome-vfs patch
Created attachment 8716 [details] [review] Untested (may not compile) nautilus patch
George et al. Just to let you know, alexl has been pretty clear that he wants .desktop file properties to be integrated into the standard nautilus properties dialog.
That's all great, but is that easily doable in gnome 2.0.0 time? I'm not sure I will have the time to do that. If you need to do that you'd have to put a lot of the panel code that's used in the gnome-desktop-entry-edit program into nautilus. I think this is too much for 2.0.0. The above is a minimal change that should fix the bug for now, and we can make it nicer and better later.
George: I have no say in this matter obviously. I just wanted to convey to you previous comments alex has made.
*** Bug 83206 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Alex are you working on this ? I don't want to tread on your toes, but this needs fixing ...
I'm about to commit
Just comitted to CVS. We still need a fix for the vfolder monitors if this is to work nice since currently you need to hit reload to see any changes. You need to update gnome-vfs, gnome-mime-data, gnome-panel and nautilus to get this working well.
This breaks launcher creation on the desktop. Reopening because i'm too lazy to create a new bug.
Ahhh, found it, fixing it, committing etc etc etc ... try it again now :) (what a doofus I am)