Special Folders, the desktop and root nodes

[Simon Naunton <snaunton gmail com>]

Hi All,

On my PC at home, I have a "public" (as in anyone who has access to my
PC and is a member of the public group) folder which contains shared
music, movies, documents etc. My girlfriend always asks "where is the
music again?" so I thought I would add this folder as a root node to
the file manager's tree view. A little hacking and one line of code
later it was added, albeit hardcoded. So, I now have "Public Folders",
as well as "Home Folder", "File System" etc etc as root nodes.

I was thinking that being able to add "Special Folders" - user defined
links to folders which will appear on the desktop and as root nodes in
the file manager tree - to Nautilus would be a nice feature, if done
properly i.e. configured with gconf - obviously not hardcoded.

Obviously someone must have thought of this before so I have beed
searching the archives and found the following where this is
discussed.

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2003-January/msg00100.html

I was not using linux at this time (only started after the release of
gnome2) so I am not sure how nautilus used to work so I assume that
the result of the above thread was to add the "Home Folder", "File
System", etc that to me is already there. Is my assumption correct?

Was the "Special Folders" idea dropped completely? This is not
entirely clear from reading through the list.

I would quite like to work on something like this and make a
contribution to the greater good via a patch, but if it has already
been decided against by the project I will stick with hardcoding the
link myself or if plans are a foot to include it anyway I will wait
(unless I can help?).

Thanks,

Si.