I work at a company that uses Samba for file sharing, which means that I rely on it a lot throughout the day. Unfortunately, the service provider of the VPN has not been able to cope with the traffic that has resulted from everyone working from home, and so the Samba shares are frequently slow or unavailable. Even more unfortunate, when this happens, it causes Nautilus and Nemo, the two file managers for Ubuntu that I have tried, to freeze.

It's not just the current tab that freezes while it's trying to load. It's also the other tabs, the menu to the left and even other windows of that file manager. After a while I'm given the option to force quit. However, I often cannot start the file manager again until my access to the Samba share is restored because it will try to open it at startup and immediately freeze.

It's a bit like using a web browser that freezes all of its tabs and all of its windows if a website is down, offers you to force quit, and then hangs on startup until the website is available again. However (warning: snark ahead), web browsers have a brilliant solution to this problem called threads. Is there a file manager for Ubuntu that similarly solves this issue?

Is there an easy way to transfer files between two SSH/SFTP servers? The perfect solution would be FileZilla, but it only lets you create a connection between local and remote, but not between remote and remote.

Theoretically I could open two Nautilus windows and connect to some ssh://server1/path/to/folder and ssh://server2/path/to/folder and then just pull the files from one to the other side. My experience is that this is very unstable. Transmitting files in size sum of i.e. 10MB is no problem, but transferring i.e. 10GB often resulted in Nautilus hanging itself up and remaining there in need of ps -e | grep nautilus -> kill -9 <pid>. I also tested the same thing with Nemo and Caja. While Nemo tends to be more stable than the two others, it still is not perfect and also breaks from time to time. FileZilla is extremely stable, never really got it to break, but it is not very flexible due to the mentioned fact that it can only connect to a single SSH server.

Of course I could also mount a folder with sshfs, but this is kind of an inconvenient solution. Too much pre-work to do to get a simple transfer running.

Is there any app that can handle transfers between two SSH servers without breaking? Perfect would be something like FileZilla, that picks up the job again if the connection got interrupted.

Nautilus and Nemo use two different icons for python files:

But I want them to show the python icon for all python files.

mimetype gives the same result for both files:

$ mimetype *.py
buy_test.py:         text/x-python
candlestick_test.py: text/x-python

file -i gives different outputs:

$ file -i buy_test.py 
buy_test.py: text/x-python; charset=us-ascii
$ file -i candlestick_test.py 
candlestick_test.py: text/x-objective-c; charset=us-ascii

The output for candlestick_test.py is wrong but this file is shown with the python icon. No idea why.

Somebody here had the same problem: Ubuntu file manager is not showing proper icons

But the answer he got, doesn't work for me:

$ grep -r 'text/x-python' /usr/share/thumbnailers

No output.

I think the main diffenrence between these python files is the shebang:

$ head -n2 buy_test.py 
#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
$ head -n2 candlestick_test.py 
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""

When I use this shebang (python 2) ...

#!/usr/bin/env python

... there is a python icon, too.

How do Nautilus and Nemo choose file icons?

EDIT:

Some additional information:

There is a python icon if I use one of these shebangs:

#!/usr/bin/env python
#!/usr/bin/python

There is no python icon if I use one of these shebangs:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
#!/usr/bin/python3

So it looks like python3 is a problem.

EDIT 2:

xdg-mime query filetype FILENAME returns the MIME type matching the shebang:

$ xdg-mime query filetype buy_test.py 
text/x-python3

$ xdg-mime query filetype candlestick_test.py 
text/x-python

And when I change candlestick_test.py's file extension to .py3, the python icon disappears and xdg-mime query filetype returns text/x-python3.

EDIT 3:

I found a new source of information:

$ gio info ~/python/buy_test.py | grep icon
  standard::icon: text-x-python3, text-x-generic
  standard::symbolic-icon: text-x-python3-symbolic, text-x-generic-symbolic, text-x-python3, text-x-generic
$ gio info ~/python/candlestick_test.py | grep icon
  standard::icon: text-x-python, text-x-generic
  standard::symbolic-icon: text-x-python-symbolic, text-x-generic-symbolic, text-x-python, text-x-generic

So I guess, I have to link text-x-python3 files to text-x-python icons somehow.

I just installed Ubuntu and I want to replace nautilus with Nemo. I first installed Nemo by using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nemo

I then used the following commands to set Nemo as the default file manager:

xdg-mime default nemo.desktop inode/directory application/x-gnome-saved-search
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons false
gsettings set org.nemo.desktop show-desktop-icons true

I learned these commands from this post. However, I receive the following error:

> GLib-GIO-Message: 15:22:17.302: Using the 'memory' GSettings backend. 
> Your settings will not be saved or shared with other applications.

Edit:

I found a fix for this error which can be found in my answer below. The accepted answer provides an updated set of instructions to make Nemo the default file manager in recent versions of Ubuntu (18.04+ at the time of writing).

Looking for a GUI mass file renamer that can be run from a selection of files in Nemo. Nemo has a built-in placeholder for a mass rename tool so you can provide the name of the app to run to rename multiple files. The files selected are passed as URIs on the command line.

I have looked at pyrenamer, gprenamer and neither seem to accept a list of files from the command line.

Anyone know of any?