How do I customize the context menu in Nautilus?

Update for Ubuntu 18.04

At the date Ubuntu 18.04 was released Nautilus-Actions was/is no longer available. It also seems to have been superseded by a new program, called Filemanager-Actions, which otherwise looks identical.

To install this program, see this solution.

Nautilus Actions

We may define our own right-click context menu items with nautilus-actions Install nautilus-actions.

  • Run the Nautilus-Actions Configuration Tool either from the Dash, or from a terminal with

     nautilus-actions-config-tool

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  • In the Action tab give your action a sensible label, e.g. "Open in Terminator" and choose to display this in the selection or the context menu.

  • Next open the Command tab to enter the commands to run

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  • Give in the full path to your command (/usr/bin/command_to_run) and program options.

  • After logging out and in again the right click context menu below will be displayed:

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This answer is outdated: a recently updated answer is this one.

App developers wanting to add their app's actions — see this page below, here and here.

Context menus of Nautilus used to be customizable by Nautilus extensions. Be warned that this link leads to archived doc; Gnome devs removed that documentation and no longer support that kind of customization. It may still work though.

You can also place plain shell scripts under the ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts (~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts in early releases) directory, and they will appear in file context menu under Scripts submenu.


One can Use python-nautilus extension as an alternative to nautilus-actions.

To install:

sudo apt-get install python-nautilus

A simple example:

import os

from gi.repository import Nautilus, GObject

class ColumnExtension(GObject.GObject, Nautilus.MenuProvider):
    def __init__(self):
        pass
    def menu_activate_cb(self, menu, file):
         os.system("write here your simple bash command & pid=$!")

    def get_background_items(self, window, file):
        item = Nautilus.MenuItem(name='ExampleMenuProvider::Foo2', 
                                         label='Name of your item', 
                                         tip='',
                                         icon='')
        item.connect('activate', self.menu_activate_cb, file)
        return item,

Copy this python script under ~/.local/share/nautilus-python/extensions and restart nautilus. When you right click on the desktop and select your item, your simple bash command will be executed :)

Tags:

Nautilus

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