Update nautilus-open-terminal Behavior (desktop_opens_home_dir)

By | 2008/11/06

For all of you that use the nautilus-open-terminal utility, which allows you to right-click on the desktop and quickly open a terminal, you may be interested in this quick-tip.  Thanks goes to a comment on Clint Savage’s blog for pointing this out to me.

In previous releases this utility would open the home directory by default when launched from the desktop.  I’ve noticed currently that this behavior has changed.  If you’d like to toggle this option you can use the following command:

gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /apps/nautilus-open-terminal/desktop_opens_home_dir true

Set the value back to “false” if you prefer it to open the Desktop when used.  Enjoy.

6 thoughts on “Update nautilus-open-terminal Behavior (desktop_opens_home_dir)

  1. Johan

    If open a terminal is all you want using a key binding for Open Terminal is really nice. I have mine bound to -Return, use it all the time.

  2. Igor

    Men! thank you so much!

    It’ll be nice that this plugin work with Terminator 😉

  3. topyli

    This may be a nice way to open terminals quickly (if you don’t like keyboard shortcuts), but it does break the original purpose of nautilus-open-terminal: opening a terminal in a specific directory from the context menu of a folder in nautilus.

    1. d2 d2

      Under U9.04, If I point into the right half of a folder browser window (for lack of a proper name), right click and choose 'open in terminal', I get *that* as my directory. OTOH, if I point-n-right-click on my desktop, I get a terminal in my home directory…. seems to work fine for my need!

      For the curious, here are some suggestions to explore gconftool-2 further:

      gconftool-2 -R / | grep /apps
      gconftool-2 -a /apps
      gconftool-2 -a /desktop
      gconftool-2 -a /system

  4. Paulo Silva

    i normally use a nautilus script for this:

    #!/bin/sh
    # open terminal here – Chris Picton, Martin Enlund, Christophe Combelles – GPL
    base=”`echo $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_CURRENT_URI | cut -d’/’ -f3- | sed ‘s/%20/ /g’`”
    if [ -z “$NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS” ]; then
    dir=”$base”
    else
    while [ ! -z “$1” -a ! -d “$base/$1″ ]; do shift; done
    dir=”$base/$1″
    fi
    gnome-terminal –working-directory=”$dir”

    this way allows you also, for example, for choosing which terminal emulator you want instead of gnome-terminal, like xterm or any other…

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