578. More Gnome issues -- semi-rant

I was able to get on with work in spite of transitioning to gnome 3 -- but only thanks to the frippery extensions:
http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/debian-testing-64-bit-gnome-3gnome.html 
http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/402-very-briefly-what-i-forgot-about.html

And then gnome-screenshot got crippled, but I managed to cope with that by patching it:
http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/fixing-gnome-screenshot-341-in-debian.html

I'm using debian testing (jessie) on my laptop and since I normally don't do much on it other than occasionally log into work to check on jobs I have been able to ignore the issues that are so apparent in gnome 3.12, two of which are:

*  gnome-terminal doesn't have a transparent background option since ersion 3.8 -- instead of being able to read what's underneath (e.g. a blog post with a how-to), and thus making good use of the screen real estate, my laptop screen is now feeling very, very small.

[And the developer seems to have the usual gnome attitude issue: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=698544 ]

gnome-terminal 3.12

 There's basically nothing that has forced me to stay with gnome-terminal, so switching terminals was a simple matter of installing xfce4-terminal instead, which looks pretty much like gnome-terminal used to. Besides, I use guake more of the time anyway.

xfce4-terminal

 * you can't resize 'native' gnome programs, such as nautilus, that are in full-screen mode. Well, you can -- by holiding super (i.e. windows button) + down arrow. But the icons in the top right corner are no longer, and I find that incredibly annoying.

Nautilus. Nautilus shows when dropbox is synced -- thunar doesn't.

Thunar -- like nautilus of days gone by

 There are two things that I need from nautilus (other than working as a filemanager, of course, and allowing me to open terminals where I want which is something thunar supports 'out of the box') -- the ability to batch resize images, and dropbox. Now, dropbox has nothing to do with nautilus and the dropbox server will run happily in the background whether you're using a file manager or not. It would be nice if thunar would show whether the dropbox folder is synced or not, but it's hardly crucial.

Image resizing is a different matter since we maintain our own little website with personal photos for overseas members of our families. Ergo, it's crucial.

Luckily, this is pretty easy:

sudo apt-get install simple-image-reducer

Go to Edit/Configure custom actions... and set command to simple-image-reducer %F, and scope to apply to images, as shown in the screenshots.

I'm sure there are lots of other small issues in gnome 3.12 that I either keep missing or wilfully ignore in the interest of maintaining a low blood pressure. The whole idea of removing features that are actually useful with no way of re-enabling them smacks of 'we know better than you', and that irks me.

538. Briefly: Sort folders before files in nautilus 3.8

I'm running debian jessie (current testing) on my laptop and after having held off upgrading for a while since I had to take it to a conference and didn't want to risk ending up with a broken system, I finally took the leap. I notice that there are a lot of references to systemd in dmesg, but haven't had a look at what it actually means -- are we past init and fully switched to systemd now? Or how do I go about modifying my network configuration if I can't use /etc/network/interfaces?

Anyway, one annoying little thing is that in Nautilus the folder content by default is arranged in alphabetical order, regardless of whether it's a file or a directory. The old behaviour was to arrange folders in alphabetical order, then files.

Here's how to get it back to 'normal' behaviour:

 

The new behaviour

Click on the 'Files' menu on the top desktop bar, select preferences:

Check 'Sort folders before files' to get back the normal behaviour

Check sort folders before files to make Nautilus behave well again

451. Seahorse plugins on gnome 3.4 -- PGP encrypting/decrypting in nautilus

Once upon a time it was possible to de/encrypt in gedit, and life was good. Then GNOME 3 came along, and the seahorse plugin for edit disappeared. (presumably you might be able to write a script to use with the External Tools gedit plugin).

It re-emerged as a plugin for Nautilus instead.

I'm showing version 3.4.0 since I'm on GNOME 3.4, and who knows what API has broken in between this and 3.8...anyway, look at https://git.gnome.org/browse/seahorse-nautilus/ for different versions.

There are probably more build dependencies than the ones I'm listing.

sudo apt-get install libcryptui-dev libnautilus-extension-dev libgpgme11-dev checkinstall autoconf automake checkinstall
wget https://git.gnome.org/browse/seahorse-nautilus/snapshot/seahorse-nautilus-3.4.0.tar.gz
tar xvf seahorse-nautilus-3.4.0.tar.gz 
cd seahorse-nautilus-3.4.0/
./autogen.sh

GnuPG Version:           gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.12
GPGME Version:           1.2.0
Notification Support:    yes

Now type `make' to compile seahorse-nautilus

sudo checkinstall --fstrans=no

-  Maintainer: [ root@beryllium ]
1 -  Summary: [ seahorse-nautilus 3.4.0 ]
2 -  Name:    [ seahorse-nautilus ]
3 -  Version: [ 3.4.0 ]
4 -  Release: [ 1 ]
5 -  License: [ GPL ]
6 -  Group:   [ checkinstall ]
7 -  Architecture: [ amd64 ]
8 -  Source location: [ seahorse-nautilus-3.4.0 ]
9 -  Alternate source location: [  ]
10 - Requires: [  ]
11 - Provides: [ seahorse-nautilus ]
12 - Conflicts: [  ]
13 - Replaces: [  ]

---

Encrypting:
Open nautilus, select a text file and right click:

---

Decrypting:
Simple:

Although in my case I had kde-full installed, which pulled in kgpg:

If you're having other issues with decrypting, check that the mime associations are correct:

xdg-mime query filetype plaintext.file.pgp 

application/pgp-encrypted

284. Fix for: nautilus-open-terminal opens in $HOME

Update: due to a change in the exec-arg, if you followed the instruction here you now can't open the terminal (using nautilus) at all if you've upgraded to nautilus 3.4.2. Look at this post to fixing it: http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/another-nautilus-open-terminal-related.html
Everything should now work perfectly.

Original post:
This has been bothering me for the past week or so: if I use nautilus-open-terminal (i.e. right-click in nautilus and select open in terminal) it now always opens in $HOME instead of in the directory I want it to open in.

 Apparently I'm not the only one: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=692518

Luckily the solution is quick and simple: run this in your terminal, then open a new nautilus window:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.default-applications.terminal exec gnome-terminal