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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can uninstall the extension by removing the extension file:
rm $HOME/.local/share/nautilus-python/extensions/open_terminal.py
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.
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 (mika.wahlroos@iki.fi), 2019-2022
Released under the GNU General Public License, version 2.