One of the things I missed a long time ago in Windows completely was the handy “start” command I could type from a command prompt to open a new Windows Explorer window in whatever directory I was in. Can you still do that? Does anyone use Windows from the command prompt any more?
I have since discovered you can do the same thing in Ubuntu Linux (and any other Linux for that matter of course!). I’m a big fan of Gnome, which uses the Nautilus file manager. If you’re fond of navigating your computer using a terminal, it’s really easy to open a Nautilus window in the current directory. Simply run ‘nautilus .‘ and a new window will open in that directory.
Don’t tell me you’re a keyboard junkie, I am too. I use Vim! Nautilus is still very useful though. Besides it’s obvious use as a file manager It’s dead handy for copying files to a remote server using any number of transmission protocols from ssh and SMB through to plain old ftp. But more on that some other time eh?
12 Comments
turly (1 comments.) on August 10, 2007 at 4:48 pm.
Just typing ‘explorer .’ works from Cygwin…
Donncha (1707 comments.) on August 10, 2007 at 4:58 pm.
I wonder if that’d work from a cmd.exe run through Wine?
Donncha (1707 comments.) on August 10, 2007 at 5:05 pm.
And sort of related, how would do something similar on Mac OS X? How do I open a Finder window from a terminal?
Peter (4 comments.) on August 10, 2007 at 5:08 pm.
‘open .’ should do the trick for you in OS X terminal.
Donncha (1707 comments.) on August 10, 2007 at 5:12 pm.
Thanks Peter! That works a treat!
David C. (1 comments.) on August 11, 2007 at 3:33 pm.
Never heard of that ‘start’ command on CLI. Maybe it was used in Win 3.1 times. Then you’d type start /s or sometinhg like that on DOS to fire up file manager. I mite well be wrong tho
Keith Gaughan (4 comments.) on August 13, 2007 at 9:52 am.
Donncha, you could also create an alias in your .zshrc/.bashrc/whatever file. My machine’s set up so that all I have to type to get a Nautilus window up is type ‘n’. Use the Schwartz!
Donncha (1707 comments.) on August 13, 2007 at 9:57 am.
Thanks for the suggestion Keith, I really have to start customizing my shell again. I used to do it a lot, back in the day when kernels needed recompiling, when new GIMP releases came out and I compiled those, when .. I didn’t use apt-get and start worrying about the important things.
I should spend some time on this though, it’s definitely worth it!
Keith Gaughan (4 comments.) on August 14, 2007 at 11:41 am.
Well, I use FreeBSD at home, so that’s still pretty much par for me.
Of course, the ports make it pretty much fire and forget, but they still take much longer than pulling down a package.
And on the topic of productivity, have you seen this yet: http://www.gravitonic.com/blog/archives/000357.html
Dankoozy (41 comments.) on August 15, 2007 at 8:03 pm.
a real keyboard junkie would never open an inferior GUI app but use something like mc. nautilus isn’t a bad file manager though. KDE is making a new one called Dolphin that isn’t bad either but the K in KDE still stands for Krap
Jeremy (1 comments.) on December 11, 2007 at 12:04 pm.
I actually use
gnome-open .becausegnome-opencan be used for opening anything, including PHP files, images, videos, music, binaries, directories, SSH/SMB/HTTP shares, websites etc. with just the one command.Sanjayan on February 3, 2010 at 11:14 am.
i want to access a remote server named athena with ip 192.168.40.99 where i got an account with name b070214cs..i got a file named googletalksetup.exe in that account.I tried to copy the file to my system but it was showing error .
so i tried to open the folder and then click-and -drag the file using gnome-open but i always get an error as gtk error cant display..what shall i do to open the file??
plzz help!!!!!!!