Regarding Nautilus scripts

["Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>]

Hello all,
I was thinking the other day that this very nice addition of Nautilus, its
scripts found on context menu, are completely going to waste, because Gnome
is shiping not even a single script by default. When users don't see at
least 1-2 useful scripts there by default, they just don't bother of finding
out more about how the thing works or why it could be useful to them.. It is
my belief that this part of gnome/nautilus is under-utilized while it can
boost more script creation, more script usage and overall give a higher
esteem to Nautilus itself as "even more useful". (hope you get what I mean,
my english suck, I know :)

I would like to ask the Nautilus team to add at least 2 scripts by default
for Gnome 2.4. Speaking about me personally, I would say that the one script
that I can't live with is the "Open Terminal Here" which opens a terminal to
the currently opened nautilus directory....

Other cool stuff to consider: automatic tar.gzip of the file/dir(s) selected
in the file manager or in the desktop, a graphical Grep (programmers will
like this), a File Type MIME utility/editor for the file selected, the Run
utility (I believe its place is in there, not in the root menu - same goes
for "Open Terminal", shouldn't be in the root dektop menu -- too geeky :),
and of course the 'Change Background Image' addon (also should not be in the
root menu, it is not something that it should create clutter there, as
people don't change their bg images all day. Let's just not be KDE please in
this matter. ;-)).

Other addon ideas include "Send to Email", Send to Fax, Send to bla-blah,
ToUpper (uppercase the filenames), ToLower, Dos2Unix (changing the carriage
return of a text file), Unix2Dos, Mac2Unix and of course "Touch" (which
calls the "touch" unix command :) and the list go on... I am not saying that
all of them should be there by default but a good selection should be to
enhance Nautilus and utilize stuff easier.

I understand that currently Nautilus Scripts are primarily bash scripts
IIRC, but I believe a real add-on framework should be in place (not sure if
Nautilus have that but I have seen 0 graphical addons/scripts so far). The
addon framework doesn't have to be complex, in fact, it is pretty easy to
implement. Steal some ideas from here (the protocol described below was
coded by the same person who worked both on Nautilus and who previously
wrote all by himself the BeOS Tracker (today he works on Apple's Finder ;)):
http://bang.dhs.org/be/bebook/Tracker/Tracker%20Add-ons.html#Tracker%20Add-on%20Protocol

Additionally, I would advocate that I don't like much applications adding
their own context menu entries in the root Nautilus menu as File-Roller did
recently. I mean, I hate my Windows and KDE menus when they have a whole
bunch of options added there by third party apps without asking me first...
And it is bad enough that there is no way I can take them out easily or
without having the knowledge of how to go about it. Please note that I am
*not* against menu option additions. I just believe they should go under the
"addon" submenu on Nautilus (previously "Scripts" in my mind) and play nice
with the addon framework. I like clean stuff. ;-)

Best Regards,
Eugenia