If you’re a Gnome user and have watched with envy as your KDE4-using friends effortlessly open a terminal directly in their file-browser, you may be interested in Nautilus Terminal.

Fabien Loison is behind Nautilus Terminal. I asked him a little about the project.

Matthew: What were you doing when you realised that life would be easier if you had a terminal in Nautilus?

Fabien: I was programming and I had a lot terminals open on different folders. I realized I was losing a lot of time to find the one I wanted, and then I remembered that Midnight Commander has an interesting feature: it permits you to enter commands in the current folder. I searched on the web and saw that (KDE 4’s file manager) Dolphin offers this kind of functionality, but nothing about Nautilus… So I decided to do it myself: I started programming Nautilus Terminal.

Matthew: And are you happy with the result?

Fabien: Although Nautilus Terminal is not as well integrated with Nautilus I would like (due to limitations of its extension system), I think I have solved my problem. 🙂

Matthew: What sort of reaction have you had?

Fabien: Most reactions were positive: since the day of the first release I have received many emails and also some blogs have written about Nautilus Terminal (WebUpd8, OMG Ubuntu,…). It seems that many people wanted this feature in Nautilus.

Matthew: So what made you choose Launchpad?

Fabien: I had already been using Launchpad for other projects for several months, and I like it (especially its integration with Bazaar), so I used it one more time. 🙂

Matthew: What has been the most useful part of Launchpad?

Fabien: The most useful part of Launchpad for this project has been the bug tracker, because there were a lot of problems in the first versions.

Matthew: And, similarly, where would you like to see Launchpad improve?

Fabien: That is a difficult question… Maybe having a small wiki for every projects (for the documentation).

Matthew: Finally, are you looking for contributions from other people?

Fabien: Yes, especially for the translations, because I can’t do it myself for all languages (I can translate in French only). So thanks to all translators (and all the people who have helped with code, bug reports,…). 🙂

Matthew: Thanks Fabien!

Visit Nautilus Terminal in Launchpad.