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shantanu
Asked: 2011-07-15 12:18:06 +0800 CST

How do I highlight an item in Nautilus?

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When we download something in firefox and right-click on item [firefox->download] and select open with folder it just open containing folder [nautilus] but does not highlight the downloaded item.

In windows and mac open folder highlight the downloaded item. It is very difficult to find recently downloaded file if there are so many existing file or folder. Is there is any way to do this in nautilus?

nautilus

1 Answers

  1. The specific feature you asked about is not availaale, but here are a couple of alternatives:

    1. When nautilus is open at the relevant directory, just start typing the first few letters of the file name. This will highlight the file.

    2. Using the following tools you can use the clipboard and skip the typing, as follows: Install these: sudo apt-get install nautilus-scripts-manager xdotool xsel
      Then create the following nautilus-script in the nautilus-scripts-manager directory.

      #!/bin/bash                           
       xdotool type $(xsel -o -b; sleep .3) 

    Next, assign a short-cut key to run the script.
    It is very practical to use a short-cut key which is local to nautilus. You can do this via a combination of nautilus-scripts-manager's sub-menu item for this script (under nautilus' File menu), and a gnome short-cut key manager tool, which is described in this link: "Editable Menu Accelerators" (on a per app basis).

    Set up a short-cut key, eg. Ctrl-Shift-S, and then just copy the filename to the clipboard. amd run the script via the short-cut key. This will "type" the text in the clipbooard, as though you typed it, and the nautilus auto-search feature will pinpoint the file and highlight it.

    More: You could modify the script to strip out the filename from the downoad link... This means that you could sometimes(often?) just copy the download link to the clipboard.

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