In the next article we are going to take a look at Nautilus Terminal 3. This is a tool to embed a terminal in Nautilus, the default file browser for Gnome. Using this Nautilus plugin allows you to show / hide a built-in terminal by pressing only the key F4, although this can be changed.
This terminal will always open in the current directory. It will also continue to navigate the file manager. The cd command runs automatically when browsing folders in Nautilus.
Nautilus Terminal 3 General Features
- Embed a Terminal in every Nautilus tab / window.
- It has a basic configuration. But this we will have to do it from Dconf.
- If we navigate in Nautilus, the command CD runs automatically in terminal.
- Detect the running process.
- Supports copy / paste from / to terminal using Ctrl + Shift + C / Ctrl + Shift + V.
- It can show / hide terminal by pressing F4 key. This is configurable with Dconf.
- Supports the possibility of drag and drop files into terminal.
- Use the default shell for the user.
- It allows configure terminal appearance (background and text color).
- As stated by the creator on his GitHub page, this utility is still today in an initial development version, some functions are missing.
These are just some of the features of this plugin for Nautilus. Can be consult all of them from project GitHub page.
Install Nautilus Terminal 3 on Ubuntu 20.04
Nautilus Terminal 3 can be installed using PIP (for both Python 2 and Python 3, although for this example I will only use Python 3).
Before installing Nautilus Terminal 3 we will have to install the packages pip, python-psutil and Python Nautilus from the Ubuntu repositories. In Ubuntu 20.04 or 20.10 we will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and use the command:
sudo apt install python3-pip python3-psutil python3-nautilus
Once the previous installation is finished, we can start installing Nautilus Terminal for current user. In Ubuntu 20.04 and 20.10 we will only need to write in the same terminal:
python3 -m pip install --upgrade --user nautilus_terminal
When the installation is complete, you will have to restart Nautilus to use the new Terminal plugin for Nautilus. We can do this by restarting the session or by typing in the terminal:
nautilus -q
Set up
As I indicated above, this tool does not have a GUI from which to change its configuration directly, although it does have some options that it will allow us to modify. To do it we will have to have Dconf Editor installed. If you still don’t have this program on your computer, just open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and run the following command to install this program:
sudo apt install dconf-editor
Here, keep in mind that we must run Nautilus with the Nautilus Terminal plugin installed at least once, so that the Dconf editor options for this plugin are displayed.
The configuration of this plugin for Nautilus, can be changed using Dconf Editor, and navigating from the program screen to / org / flozz / nautilus-terminal /.
In this screen is where we can change the value of the keyboard shortcut to show / hide the terminal from its default value (F4) to any key that interests us. We will also find the background color and foreground color options, which allows you to change the background of the terminal and the color of the text.
It’s important pointing that you need to restart Nautilus Terminal, by running nautilus -q in a terminal, after changing some of the configuration options in Dconf Editor, to be able to see the changes.
Uninstall
If you want remove this plugin from Terminal for Nautilus, we will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute the following command:
python3 -m pip uninstall nautilus-terminal
Nautilus Terminal 3 is a tool that can be very useful for many users who want to have the terminal always at hand. For more information about this project, its installation and configuration, users can consult the project GitHub page.
