GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 318303
"Open link target" context menu option for symlinks
Last modified: 2013-01-15 23:37:21 UTC
This option, vs. the traditional "Open" option should open the link target by first resolving the symlink.
Thanks for your bug report! I can see no reason why one would need such a feature. My shell behaves like Nautilus does ATM, it hides away the actual location the symlink points to. Maybe you could elaborate on what problem you're trying to solve?
Sometimes you might want to use the symlink as if it were more like a shortcut. If I create a .desktop file to be a shortcut I can't use it in the shell.
You can use it in the shell like a shortcut?
Yeah, cd -P symlink.
Updating versions and reopening.
I have no clue how we can support this in an intuitive fashion.
Easy, just add a folder context menu underneath "Open" on folders, as "Open link target". This resolves the symlink, and changes directory to that.
I think opening a symlink should be treated as a shortcut too. About 99.9% of the time, that's what I'm using symlinks for when browsing with Nautilus. I most definitely do not want the symlink path in there, I want to jump to the real path. A bad side effect of current behavior too is that Nautilus passes the symlink path to applications, so it gets stored in various places. Think about how often people create several shortcuts to save some time, and then remove them. Now we have a bunch of broken paths stored. It's not as big a deal in the shell, because most of the time file operations are local, or the applications are written to handle the symlink issue. Very, very few GUI applications are designed with symlinks in mind.
I meant to add: my biggest problem right now is that Nautilus is crashing or failing to update when viewing via a symlink. If that were fixed I'd be more flexible on this issue... :)
Updating versions. Still an issue.
Created attachment 144711 [details] [review] Adds option to open a links target folder
I don't think adding this makes any sense. Instead we should just finish the work to propely support both symlinks (pretend /home is /home, not /mnt/some-device/hom) and shortcut (desktop files that let you open a target uri quickly) in the UI. This was decided long ago in various discussions, but we never really realized it.
Comment on attachment 144711 [details] [review] Adds option to open a links target folder Setting patch status per Alex's comment.
Close as wontfix then?
Yes, as for comment #12.
*** Bug 604248 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***