Gnome Nautilus Extensions

the quick but hopefully clean tutorial … in pure C.

by Heiko Voigt, Oktober 2009 (updated January 2016)

A simple Example

So you want to write a simple nautilus extension but do not know where to start? First of all: There is a small github repository where you can get the current code to get started. It might even be the only thing you need.

unzip simple-nautilus-extension-master.zip
cd simple-nautilus-extension-master
make

become root or give yourself write access to the /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-X.0/ folder and:

make install

For debugging and getting the actual output on the commandline it helps to kill nautilus and manually start it from the Terminal with

killall nautilus; nautilus

again.

For the example I basically plugged everything from Nautilus Extensions together in a project, wrote a simple Makefile and compiled it. So now you find only two files in there: the Makefile itself and a plugin.c which are pretty much explained by the link above.

To keep things short I will stop here so you can play around with the example and let the source speak for itself.

I created this tutorial and example because I needed a starting point to port the git plugin git-cheetah to nautilus.

Links

• Nautilus Extensions - This seems to be the original reference specification
• Thread on the mailinglist - A little insight about the documentation situation
• Extending Nautilus - A page on the Gnome Website about Nautilus Extensions
• Nautilus Extensions - Another page from the Gnome Website about Nautilus Extensions
• nautilus-vcs - The official example of a nautilus extension in C (although not compiling for me)
• The GTK+ tutorial - A good resource about general GTK programming