The second month of the Fellowship is already over, let’s see what I got up to this month

Nautilus

I started implementing Tobias’ redesigned “Open With” mockup . The foundations to make the changes are done, as are most of the UI changes. Here is a preview:

Due to technical limitations the design will need adjustments. Nautilus only can retrieve information about one recently used application per file type, but the mockup intended to have the displayed apps sorted by recency (and then limited to only showing 5 of them). Nautilus could start tracking app usage itself, but it probably would make more sense to have it in the App Chooser Portal . Unfortunately the portal currently does not support opening more than one file. For now I will implement a compromise of the mockup in nautilus and in parallel work on a proposal to extended the portal API to also cover opening multiple files.

While working on the app chooser I also found some fixes an improvements for it that still made it into the 51 release. Additionallyation per file type, but the mockup intended to have the displayed apps sorted by recency (and then limited to only showing 5). Nautilus could start tracking app usage itself, but it probably would make more sense to have it in the App Chooser Portal . Unfortunately the portal currently does not support opening more than one file , I fixed memory trimming when closing a window , removed mispositioned menu entries and made navigating feel slightly smoother .

I also investigated an obscure bug with the location entry and figured nautilus could be a lot more efficient when getting completions. Instead of checking the contents of the typed path for each entered letter, it’s enough to only do that whenever the typed directory changed. (So far only some cleanups for that are ready.)

Sushi

I continued polishing sushi for the 51 release, which will be the first major overhaul it has received since its initial release 15 years ago. Tau Gärtli and I ping-ponged many MRs between one another, which can be seen by the extensive release notes for 51.rc . Some of the changes I made this month:

• Add a plugin example with support for shortcuts and UI files
• Forward Trash and Rename shortcuts to nautilus
• Add play/pause shortcut for audio and video files
• Hide titlebar on fullscreen
• Various leak plugging, bug fixes and cleanups, including obsoleting some outdated mime type lists

gnome-autoar

gnome-autoar is a convenience library that is built around libarchive and provides nautilus’ archive capabilities. It also offered some archive-related widgets, which made it depend on GTK3, and therefore by extension made nautilus depend on GTK3. The only known consumer, Evolution, had already inlined those widgets, so they were ripe for removal.

I fixed and modernized the CI, fixed-up and landed Emmanuele Bassi’s MR to remove the GTK3 widgets, landed a combination of MRs by Iñigo Martínez and Corey Berla for modern docs and added the release service CI pipeline to create a new release, which was accepted into the 51 cycle via a freeze exception .

With that, nautilus shouldn’t have any direct GTK3 dependencies left, only the recommended usage of xdg-user-dirs-gtk which I will tackle in the 52 release cycle.

Roadmap

As this month was at the end of the release cycle, I focused a bit more on things that could still make it to the next release. I still made some progress on the open-with rework though.

Support the GNOME Project

The GNOME Fellowships are funded by our community. If you would like to help the GNOME project to stay sustainable, please consider donating .

AI Summary

Still trying to locate the XDG creature, the group heads to the archive, where they meet Autoar. The old gnome mage has fallen prey to the curse of Groaning Time Konundrum, but clear instructions on how to lift the curse are already prepared, along with others on how to improve the archive in general. Thankful for having their curse lifted, Autoar prophesizes that the group will achieve great things in the next sun cycle and points them to instructions for creating portals. Together they enjoy some of the freshest sushi rations they had in the last 15 years.

Important note: All statements in this blog are fictional.