Backend support for opening a folder in the terminal

[Michael Spencer]

It would be nice to have an action to open a folder in the terminal, but this needs backend support. I want it to work for the currently selected folder and for long-tapping on an individual folder. A function definition like this would be nice:

openInTerminal(filePath)

[Carlos Jose Mazieri (carlos-mazieri)]

The question is: how to find the default terminal application.

Options in precedence order:

              [ALL] /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator
              [Ubuntu Touch] /usr/bin/terminal-app
              [Nemo Mobile] /usr/bin/meego-terminal
              [ALL] XTERM environment variable

Agree?

I would suggest:
                                     closeTerminal() function to finish the terminal application
                                     terminalAppActive true/false property to inform when a terminal is opened/closed
                                                                          even the user exits from the terminal the file-manager will receive the notification

[Michael Spencer (ibelieve)]

There has been a discussion on the ubuntu-phone mailing list, starting here: https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-phone/msg03084.html

Maybe this should be moved to ubuntu-ui-toolkit?

Why would we need a way to know if the terminal is active and a way to close it?

[Carlos Jose Mazieri (carlos-mazieri)]

The idea of closing and keeping the state of the terminal application is to provide a faster way of closing it.
The "kate" editor which I use opens the terminal embedded and has this kind of "button" which stays "checked" when the terminal is open, so we can close the terminal faster than typying "exit" inside it.

About opening the terminal, I do not see a Ubuntu API to do that, as far I know the way of opening is to use QProcess class.

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey)]

I'd like to revive this as a feature we could use.

I'd change the specification to launch the terminal, but I would not expect the file manager to care about whether the terminal has been closed or not. We would like to implement multiple tabs in the phone terminal, and I'd expect launching a terminal from the file manager to open a new tab in that directory. If the user wishes to switch back to the file manager and launch another, they should be able to, up to whatever maximum number of tabs/terminals the terminal app would allow.