Nautilus is the default file browser for the Gnome environment in Ubuntu. Nautilus Actions is a tool for Nautilus that allows you to add programs to the Gnome context or context menu. This enables you to right-click a file, such as a text file, and select the program with which to open the file from the pop-up menu.
To install Nautilus Actions, open a terminal window and enter the following:
sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions
After installing Nautilus Actions, select Preferences | Configuring Nautilus Actions from the System Menu.
The Nautilus Actions dialog box appears. To add a new action, click Add.
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The Add New Action dialog box appears.
In this example, we add the “Open with Amarok” option to the context menu so that we can right-click the .mp3 file and open it in the Amarok player. Enter “Open with Amarok” as the label for the menu item in the Label edit box.
If you want the tooltip to be displayed, enter the desired text in the tooltip edit box. We left this field blank. Click the Browse button to select an icon. The nautilus-actions dialog box opens with a list of bitmaps to choose from. Scroll down, find the Amarok icon as shown in the image below and click on it.
Click Open to select the icon and return to the Add New Action dialog box. To select Amarok, click the Browse button next to the Path edit box in the Add New Action dialog box (shown above). In the nautilus-actions dialog, scroll down to find amarok listed in the right pane and click it.
Click Open to select the program and return to the Add New Action dialog box.
If you want to specify any parameters to send to the selected program, add them using the Parameters edit box. Click the Legend button to view a list of formats for the various options that you can use. Parameters are command line parameters used when invoking the application.
NOTE. To find out the available options for the selected application, open a Terminal window and run ‘[command] –help’ (for example, ‘amarok –help’) or, for a more detailed description, use ‘man [command]’ (for example, man amarok).
There are no parameters we would like to add for Amarok, so we left the parameter edit field blank. Click OK to accept the changes and close the Add New Action dialog box.
Then click Close in the Nautilus Actions dialog box.
We open the Music folder in the Places menu to access our .mp3 file.
Right click on the .mp3 file and the Open with Amarok option becomes available.
You can add shortcuts to other applications for commonly used file types.
Posted by Laurie Kaufman
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