Ubuntu – Is it possible to hide the “Copy To” and “Move To” context menus

nautilus

I've just read this question and realized that I had never used either the "Copy To" or "Move To" context menu – is it possible to hide them?

alt text

Best Answer

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.

11.10 onwards

Maybe this might work:

Nautilus scripts the bullets state, amongst others:

Move To... #selected files/folders to ... whereever you want. the script will check if you have write-permissions and if the file already exists
Copy To...

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.

Ubuntu – How to edit the context menus of Nautilus File Manager

To add menu items to can write a Nautilus extension, like

from gi.repository import Nautilus, GObject

class MyItemExtension(GObject.GObject, Nautilus.MenuProvider):
    def get_file_items(self, window, files):
        menuitem = Nautilus.MenuItem(name='MyItem::SomeItem', 
                                     label='My Item', 
                                     tip='my own item',
                                     icon='')

        menuitem.connect('activate', self.on_menu_item_clicked, files)
        return menuitem,

    def on_menu_item_clicked(self, item, files):
        print [f.get_name() for f in files]

Save this into something like /usr/share/nautilus-python/extensions/myitem.py, install the package python-nautilus and restart Nautilus, for example by running nautilus -q; sleep 2; nautilus. Now you should see a new item "My Item" if you rightclick a file.

As far as I know there is no documented way to remove menu items.

The see API reference for some more information.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Why do the “Copy to” and “Move to” context menus in Nautilus only offer “Home” and “Desktop” as options

11.10 onwards

Ubuntu – How to edit the context menus of Nautilus File Manager

Related Question