Suggestion for an addition to the menu

[avj]

I got to thinking about what windows users are used to having available from the menu, and thought it would be nice if the menu had access to user folders like the Documents, Downloads, Pictures, and others.  So I made the menu entries on my system to see if it would work. Below is a screenshot of my results.


For the item entries, in the command I entered "thunar" followed by a space, and the folder name of the folder for each item.
Example:  thunar Documents

[valtam]

I really like this! This is a great idea

[valtam]

[avj]

Glad you like it, it should help new users with the transition to Linux in my opinion. It should help save mouse clicks as well. 

[valtam]

Look for this in LL 3.0

[Lynne]

I got to thinking about what windows users are used to having available from the menu, and thought it would be nice if the menu had access to user folders like the Documents, Downloads, Pictures, and others.  So I made the menu entries on my system to see if it would work.

For the item entries, in the command I entered "thunar" followed by a space, and the folder name of the folder for each item.
Example:  thunar Documents

This is a very good idea @avj. ... 

I must admit to not missing this on the menu from windoze though, and for LL I have a panel link of the Home folder which is nice and easy for me to access all I want to get to.  But then I changed from Thunar to Nautilus so I could have all my bookmarks and places available again. ... 8)

[valtam]

We'll be using exo-open Documents for example in the Menu, so whatever your default file manager is, it will open it.

[Lynne]

We'll be using exo-open Documents for example in the Menu, so whatever your default file manager is, it will open it.

I don't really understand what you mean @Jerry, even though I had a quick look at Google to see what it's supposed to mean. To me it's all gobbledly-gook at this stage.  ???

I'll have to wait for LL 3.0 to understand it all. *sigh*

...  8)

I get to modify this post, woohoo!...

Since having a sleep and a couple of cups of coffee, I've been able to really have a look at this exo-open Documents thingy and boy, am I not impressed!! It smacks too much of "1984" and all those "out there" who can hack your computer can see exactly what you have ... all the metadata that is there, from emails to documents to anything on your computer. While it looks great from a "personal" point of view that only you have access, who knows who else will have access - children, husband, wife, breakup of a relationship, lawyers, judges, etc...

...  :o

[avj]

To Jerry,  that is awesome.

To Lynne, I am not sure where the information you provided came from but, the manual page for exo-open doesn't suggest anything suspicious in my opinion.

Code:

EXO-OPEN(1)                    Xfce Users Manual                   EXO-OPEN(1)

NAME
       exo-open - Open URLs and launch preferred applications

SYNOPSIS
       exo-open [[url]...]

       exo-open --launch [category] [[parameter]...]

DESCRIPTION
       exo-open is a command line frontend to the Xfce Preferred Applications
       framework. It can either be used to open a list of urls with the
       default URL handler or launch the preferred application for a certain
       category.

INVOCATION
       exo-open either takes a list of URLs and tries to open each of them
       using the default handler, or, when using the --launch tries to launch
       the preferred application for a certain category, optionally passing
       any number of parameters to the application.

   Options
       -?, --help
           Print brief help and exit.

       -v, --version
           Print version information and exit.

       --working-directory directory
           When using the --launch option and this option is specified as
           well, the application will be run in the given directory. This is
           primarily useful when running the preferred TerminalEmulator from
           another application and you want the command in the terminal window
           to be run in a specific directory.

       --launch category parameters...
           Launch the preferred application for the given category with the
           optional parameters..., where category is either WebBrowser
           MailReader, TerminalEmulator or FileManager.

       If you do not specify the --launch option, exo-open will open all
       specified URLs with their preferred URL handlers. Else, if you specify
       the --launch option, you can select which preferred application you
       want to run, and pass additional parameters to the application (i.e.
       for TerminalEmulator you can pass the command line that should be run
       in the terminal).

COMPOSING EMAILS
       exo-open allows users and developers to open the preferred email
       composer from the command line by simply invoking exo-open
       mailto:[email protected]. This will open the composer window with
       [email protected] as the recipient. This syntax is supported by all
       MailReaders. In addition the MailReaders that ship as part of libexo
       also support extended mailto:-URIs (but be aware that user-defined
       mailers do not necessarily support this), which allows you to also
       specify default values for the subject and the body of the mail, add
       additional recipients (both Cc: and To:) and attach files to emails.
       For example
       mailto:[email protected][email protected]&subject=Foo&attach=/foo/bar.txt tells
       the composer to start an email to [email protected] and [email protected] with Foo
       in the subject and the file /foo/bar.txt attached to the message.

AUTHOR
       exo-open was written by Benedikt Meurer [email protected].

       This manual page was provided by Benedikt Meurer [email protected].

Xfce                              12/27/2012                       EXO-OPEN(1)

[gold_finger]

Since having a sleep and a couple of cups of coffee, I've been able to really have a look at this exo-open Documents thingy and boy, am I not impressed!! It smacks too much of "1984" and all those "out there" who can hack your computer can see exactly what you have ... all the metadata that is there, from emails to documents to anything on your computer. While it looks great from a "personal" point of view that only you have access, who knows who else will have access - children, husband, wife, breakup of a relationship, lawyers, judges, etc...

...  :o

I don't know what you stumbled upon and read, but whatever it was it wasn't about the "exo-open" command.

Sounds more like you stumbled on info about forensic data analysis tools that can be used to find things on hard drives, etc.  That is a whole different ball of wax and has nothing to do with the "exo-open" command.

Have a read through manual page posted by avj.

Basically, "exo-open" is used as a generic replacement for specific commands to open specific programs.  So, as per example being talked about here -- adding Documents, Music, etc. folders to the main menu -- if Jerry were to use the command for thunar to open the Document folder (thunar Documents) and you had decided to change your system to using the nautilus file manager, the command would not work for you (if you had deleted the thunar program), or would have opened the folder in thunar (if you still had it installed) even though you prefer using nautilus.  So instead of using the specific command for the specific file manager thunar to open Documents, the exo-open command is used.  It will first find out what is the preferred application on your system for opening files/folders, then execute that -- in your case, nautilus.

Same basic idea applies to opening web links for another example.  Some people may have deleted the default Firefox browser and instead use Chrome or some other browser, thus their preferred browser application is different than the initial default of firefox.  Any command they try to execute that specifies firefox will fail because they don't have it installed anymore.  But a command using exo-open will check the "preferred applications" list for browsers and open the link with the browser shown there.