@alatiera the only reasonable template is an empty text file, which is entirely pointless because it's exactly the same as opening a text editor, except instead of clicking on the icon, you have to right click in Nautilus and find the item in the context menu…

Any other template file is just not an empty file, because if it has a size of zero bytes it'll be opened by anything that supports application/x-zerosize—i.e. a text editor—or it'll be using the extension and make a mess.

@danirabbit that was the one of the reasons why we ended up binning the templates: "create a file" versus "open an application to do a task". The latter puts the task front and centre, because people have become unfamiliar with the concept of "file" and file systems

@alatiera @razze

@danirabbit @ebassi @alatiera The only time I was able to use that feature effectively was when we had to file expense reports by filling a pre-made spreadsheet. I copied expenses.xls to the templates dir - because I knew that trick - and used the feature maybe twice a year.

Was there ever a "create template from this file" command? It was hard to discover otherwise.

I think that ship had sailed long before we could do anything about it; younger folks have stopped thinking in terms of files, and we are not in a position to reverse that trend, given the size of our audience

@danirabbit @alatiera

I don’t think this is something that needs to be “improved” 😅 it’s just a change in the way people think about computers

@ebassi @alatiera

@ebassi @alatiera ‘verbs’, in Win32 land, are very much their own mess but nevertheless that you can register to ‘Edit’ rather than simply ‘Open’ is kinda neat

One of the problems of course is that AFAIK ‘Edit’ isn't actually one of the ‘standard’ verbs 🙈

@federicomena @danirabbit @alatiera the minimal, crappiest Nautilus extension possible for this stuff is here: gitlab.gnome.org/ebassi/nautil…

Future expansion: being able to rename the file prior to copying it, to give it a meaningful name; showing the progress UI for large file copies; supporting source files on remote storage.

Emmanuele Bassi / Nautilus Template Marker · GitLab

Welcome to GNOME GitLab

^GitLab

@alatiera @ebassi FWIW, I made an templates collection of different types of empty files as templates over a decade ago, if you'd like to try this out (with minimal effort).

github.com/garrett/document-te…

Instructions at the top of the page; basically clone the repo to ~/Templates

GitHub - garrett/document-templates: Document templates for GNOME/KDE/etc.: git clone github.com/garrett/document-templates.git ~/Templates/

Document templates for GNOME/KDE/etc.: git clone https://github.com/garrett/document-templates.git ~/Templates/ - garrett/document-templates

^GitHub

@jorge @alatiera @ebassi Not that I'm aware of.

I'm pretty sure these all still work pretty well, but I haven't tested them all recently. It's probably worth a refresh, if people are interested.

I tried to make them a bit balanced, but re-evaluating what goes in (or should be left out) is probably not a bad idea either.

@garrett @alatiera @ebassi They're working pretty good here!

I wonder if we can add these after initial user creation?

@jorge if you dump them into /etc/skel, you can add them at user creation on install. The proper fix would be to ship templates with applications and have a hierarchy of search paths, but alas

@garrett @alatiera @razze

@ebassi @garrett @alatiera Yeah, we have glue scripts that do this for things that need to go in the user's space but it's ugly and everyone hates it, heh.

And it's "one and done" on install, there's no lifecycle management there, so if you wanted to ship a new one you'd be out of luck.

@jorge @ebassi @garrett /usr/share/factory/etc/skel/ should aslo work so they can be just in the /usr tree

Sidenote, nowdays gnome-sessions ships a default mimeapps list as well so we could potentially add something simple there as a stopgap, though not a fan of that

@alatiera yeah, that falls apart pretty quickly once you start asking whether we we should ship templates for applications that are not in core, and since we don't really have many creation/editing apps in core, it gets hard to justify it, because it comes with its own color swatch book for the bikeshed

@jorge @garrett @razze

@ebassi @garrett @alatiera Well Garrett if you're in the mood to curate a new set based on an opinionated set of default apps, I'd be down for that!

(I think this would be great with Pinta).

@ebassi @alatiera @jorge I wonder how good the unhandled mime type to install process is at the moment.

(I know it works. At least usually. I'm wondering how good it is right now, especially for any file type that would be common enough to consider shipping.)