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.
Nautilus scripts
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.
Prompting for user input
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 solution
The result is the script dmenu_move and its accompagnying buddy dmenu_go:
Here is a short demo of the two in action:
Enjoy!
Tagged #linux, #productivity.