It is unfortunately not possible to do this in either 12.04 or 12.10, because of the changes to Nautilus
and the removal of /usr/share/nautilus/ui/nautilus-directory-view-ui.xml
. It has been asked very recently (June 2012) in the gnome nautilus mailing lists, and it is clear from the developers' responses that one would now have to download the source code, patch it, and then recompile it to eliminate or hide the copy to and move to menus.
Emmanuel Bassi, a gnome developer, responded to the same request on the mailing list by noting that:
The UI definitions are part of the application:
modifying them is the equivalent of modifying the binary on disk.
In another response, Emmanuel goes into more detail and points out that:
It's not possible because now (in the interest of relocatability
of the application, and to improve the startup time) the UI
description file is "compiled" inside the binary itself; the UI
description file is only available in the Git repository, and every
change requires recompiling Nautilus.
Given that editing the UI file once installed was never a supported
action for the reasons I pointed out in this thread, this is not a
break in functionality.
What you want to achieve cannot be done with the current, or any
future, version of Nautilus; the only way to do it is to actually
modify Nautilus so that it can do what you want.
This is the official position on Nautilus
, and so the only thing to do is to suggest a patch, or simply prepare your own patch and build your own custom version. The source code that you need is available from the git repository.
There is no dirty 'hack' that can accomplish what you want at the moment, as the developers have explained. It may change in the future, but this is the current state of affairs.
This answer is outdated: a recently updated answer is this one.
App developers wanting to add their app's actions — see this page below, here and here.
Context menus of Nautilus used to be customizable by Nautilus extensions. Be warned that this link leads to archived doc; Gnome devs removed that documentation and no longer support that kind of customization. It may still work though.
You can also place plain shell scripts under the ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts
(~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts
in early releases) directory, and they will appear in file context menu under Scripts submenu.
Best Answer
11.10 onwards
Maybe this might work:
Nautilus scripts the bullets state, amongst others:
Pick the 2 scripts from the download link and just install those just to see if it works. It is fairly old but the way Nautilus works had not changed for as far as I know.