I mostly stick to a Bash shell for my workflow. I just find things to be faster that way. Ha, or it gives me the illusion of faster at the very least? Anyhow, every once in a while I do find myself using a GUI file manager. Viewing images would be one great example, as skimming through a bunch of thumbnails vs. any alternative method definitely makes the most sense.
Now given that I mostly run Fedora Linux and that I have a tendency to go with the default of Gnome for my desktop environment, if I'm using a file manager it's going to be Nautilus. And most of the time Nautilus suits me just fine. It has a nice simple interface that at the same time is smartly designed enough to allow me to quickly navigate and manipulate my files.
There are two problems I have with Nautilus. First, they got rid of the delete option on the context menu. Or maybe there's some dconf voodoo I could perform to get it back, but that road is madness. I live with shift-delete for now.
The second problem for me, there are no options on the context menu anymore to create new files. At least by default. Or maybe my memory is fuzzy after 24 releases of Fedora and the options were never there. Right. The workaround is to populate the 'Templates' directory in your home directory.
Any file you put into Templates will show up Nautilus's 'New Document' menu, which is a submenu of the context menu. And when you create a new file using this menu, anything contained in a Templates file will be copied over to your new file.
So for example, if you want to be able to create a new empty text file, simply put an empty file in Templates and name it 'Text Document.txt'. Want a new Python script option? Put a file in Templates called 'Python Script.py' with a shebang up top. Now when you create a new python script the shebang will be at the top of your new script. Anything that's in a template file gets copied over to the new file.
A few things to note about template files. Binary files are certainly an option here. Also, file extensions won't show up in the 'New Document' menu, but will show up in your newly created file's name. And if a file of the same name as the one you're trying to create exists already, don't worry, a number, starting at 2, will be appended to the new file's name.
Yep, Nautilus is a great application with only a few tiny warts from my perspective. And now I won't forget about templates ever again, ha, the whole reason I started this post. Cheers.
