Nautiterm - Open a terminal of your choice from Nautilus

Nautiterm is an extension to the Nautilus file manager that opens a terminal window of your choice at the location of the selected folder.

The functionality is almost identical to other similar extensions, as well as to the functionality provided by the Nautilus integration of Gnome Terminal, available e.g. on Fedora as the gnome-terminal-nautilus package.

However, Nautiterm can be configured to open the terminal emulator of your choice.

The default is still to open Gnome Terminal.

Dependencies

The extension requires the following:

• Python 3.4 or higher, and Python 3 versions of the following
• Python bindings for the Nautilus Extension Framework (nautilus-python)
• PyGObject, i.e. Python bindings for the GObject library
• PyYAML

On Fedora Linux you can install the dependencies with the following command:

sudo dnf install nautilus-python python3-yaml

On Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or later, the following command should install the dependencies:

sudo apt install python3-nautilus python3-yaml

This version of the extension requires Python 3. For older distributions where the Nautilus Python bindings use Python 2.x, such as Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, check out the older version in the python2-support branch.

Installing

You can install the extension by copying the file open_terminal.py from the src/nautiterm folder into the Nautilus Python extensions folder, which is located at $HOME/.local/share/nautilus-python/. Running the following commands in the root folder of the Nautiterm repository will copy the file into the correct location:

mkdir -p $HOME/.local/share/nautilus-python/extensions
cp src/nautiterm/open_terminal.py $HOME/.local/share/nautilus-python/extensions

After installing the extension, shut down Nautilus:

nautilus -q

The extension should be enabled the next time Nautilus is started, e.g. by opening a folder.

Basic use

Right-click on a folder in Nautilus, or on the empty background of an opened folder, and the context menu should contain an option for opening a terminal at the location.

Configuration

Out of the box with no configuration, Nautiterm opens a new Gnome Terminal window. To have it open a different terminal emulator, add a file named $HOME/.config/nautiterm.yml, with the following contents:

terminal: terminal_program

where terminal_program should be replaced with the executable name of your desired terminal. For example, to have Nautilus open Terminator instead of Gnome Terminal, the configuration would usually be

terminal: /usr/bin/terminator

In the above, $HOME refers to your home directory. On Linux, the correct full name of the configuration file would typically be /home/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE/.config/nautiterm.yml.

Uninstalling

You can uninstall the extension by removing the extension file:

rm $HOME/.local/share/nautilus-python/extensions/open_terminal.py

Caveats and TODO

There is no localization support yet.

Proper packaging for easy installing and uninstalling would be nice. Python packaging tools can be used to make it somewhat user-friendly to install packages but uninstalling requires manually deleting the file since Nautilus extensions need to be placed in a custom location rather than in a standard location for executables supported by declarative setup configurations. Good packaging would probably be distro-specific.

I don't currently have the capacity to support distro-specific packaging, especially since this is a minimalistic tool that's probably mostly of interest to power users who can deal with simply copying the file. Packaging contributions are welcome, though.

Authors

The code is based on example code for the Python bindings for Nautilus extensions.

The copyright to the original source code is owned by its original authors.

Modifications to the original code:

© Mika Wahlroos ([email protected]), 2019-2022

Released under the GNU General Public License, version 2.