Integration with GNOME Files (aka Nautilus)

[ofseed]

Ghostty has had a great user experience on Linux now, especially on the GNOME desktop, thanks to the utilization of libadwaita. I think it is even more native than the GNOME Console.

Nautilus has a right-click context menu item "Open in console," which is provided by the GNOME Console. Thus, you will end up opening the GNOME console no matter what default you set.

Are you interested in providing such a feature by Nautilus' C-bindings like what the GNOME Console did, so we could make Ghostty even more native?

[mitchellh]

I'm absolutely open to it. Can you provide more details what the integration looks like from both a UX and technical direction?

[ofseed]

The UX is very simple, it's just a menu item in the right-click menu, click to open the terminal with the same working directory in Nautilus.

A similar usage is the "Send to device" provided by GSConnect as shown in the picture below.

GSConnect's Nautilus extension needs the user to have Nautilus's Python bindings installed to work. It may be possible to use its C bindings by Zig so that we can provide it directly without any additional install requirements for the user. Here is the documentation: https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/nautilus

I'm very willing to implement this feature, but I won't block anyone else who wants to work on it since I'm not that familiar with Zig.

[ofseed]

I just relaized that GNOME Console removed the extension and implemented this directly in Nautilus since GNOME 43. But it still a valid way to do this.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/console/-/merge_requests/110

[tristan957]

I wonder if the most correct implementation would be to add an Open in Terminal option to the Nautilus menu that calls xdg-terminal-exec.

[jcollie]

xdg-terminal-exec is part of the solution - we need to configure xdg-terminal-exec to know about Ghostty, but we also need to finish the work to get Ghostty to open up new surfaces with a custom config. There's some basic plumbing in place but it needs to be exposed in the Zig API and then needs to be exposed via DBus or similar.

[ofseed]

xdg-terminal-exec is currently a community solution (and I'm using it), it has had a proposal MR in freedesktop's GitLab for five years already. But I'm hesitant on this too, I thought GNOME doesn't care about the community because there are many solutions other than writing kgx (aka GNOME Console) to nautilus's code directly. It might be possible to cause them change as long as the proposal not been closed.

[ofseed]

Another potential solution is to implement an open action like kitty. kitty provided a .desktop file for this action thus we can right-click the folder and open it by kitty