Move files fast in GNOME

January 25, 2020

The problem

I tend do download lots of crap from the internet.

Mainly pictures… Of various stuff… Ranging from furniture, old computer hardware, world fair memorabilias, old japanese toys…

I was basically doing a local Pinterest before it existed.

I also like photography and will construct small catalogs of my fav pictures from people I admire.

Needless to say that my download folder can quickly turn into a real mess.

If not taken care of regularly, sorting files can be a real mess.

So I quickly developped a solution to make this repetitive task less challenging.

I found out that we could define custom scripts to be run in Nautilus, GNOME’s file explorer.

Those custom script can be launched through a right-click menu (meh) or bound to keyboard shortcuts (yay!).

We just have to refer to $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_URIS in our shell script to get the list of selected files.

We now just have to have our script mv this list of files to a chosen location.

I realized that I tend to only move stuff to a lmited number of folder. So I don’t want to be prompted everytime to enter a complete path.

What I want, instead, is to refer to one of my favorite folders. So I want a whitelist of them, and I want to be able to select one of them quickly.

To be as effiscient as possible, we associate alias to each of those location.

Enters dmenu, which is a graphical tool from suckless.org which by default acts as a minimal keyboard-driven graphical program launcher.

But by playing with its option we can use it to as a list picker.

The result is the script dmenu_move and its accompagnying buddy dmenu_go:

Here is a short demo of the two in action:

demo

Enjoy!