Caja is a great file-manager, but one unfortunate limitation is that you can’t customise the toolbar in the Preferences dialogue, like you can in Nemo (though it’s worth noting that you’re very limited in the buttons you can add in Nemo). However, you can in fact add new buttons to Caja’s toolbar, and a whole bunch of them at that, as well as reorder the buttons, and remove unwanted ones, and I’ll show you how. So just click on the links below, and soon you’ll be populating your toolbar with all the handy buttons you could need!
The Open in Terminal context-menu option is provided by the extension caja-open-terminal (which also gets installed with the caja-extensions package), so you cannot add a toolbar button for it (as it’s not built into Caja). However, I have an even better solution: open the terminal in the current folder with the F4 key!
Caja is a great file manager, and like most Linux file managers, you can use the Back/Previous and Forward/Next buttons at the beginning of the toolbar to navigate between folders you’ve been in during that session. And if you ever want to clear the history of visited folders, it’s as easy as opening the Go menu and clicking Clear History. But if you’re a power user of the history feature, and are constantly clearing it to unclutter the locations visited, then you may have thought a toolbar button for that would be handy.
But one unfortunate limitation is that you can’t customise the toolbar in the Preferences dialogue. However, you can in fact add new buttons, and remove unwanted ones, and I’ll show you how.
It comes down to specifying toolitems in the config file caja-navigation-window-ui.xml, and wherever you paste the code will determine where the button ends up. For example, if you add the code for your custom button after the entry for the Home button, that’s where it will end up; if you add it after all the default buttons, it will end up on the right end of the toolbar. So you can add your buttons where you want, reorder them as you please, and even get rid of unwanted ones.
Add “Clear History” Button
As you can see by the screenshot above, it creates a comparatively large button in the toolbar, because it displays the full Clear History label (and that can’t be changed), but if you’ve got plenty of toolbar space, and really want that button, then let’s proceed. First off, open the file for editing with the following command:
The second half of the file deals with the toolbar, so locate the button you want to put your custom ones after. Hit Enter at the end of that line, and paste the code below into the empty paragraph beneath it, making sure to preserve the indent. For this example, I’m adding the code after the Search button, but you can add it wherever you please.
Once you’ve added your custom button, save the file, then reload Caja (either by manually closing all windows, or running caja -q in the terminal, then opening Caja again). Your new toolbar button will be there and ready to use!
For info on how to Add or Remove Separators, Reorder Existing Buttons, and Remove Unwanted Buttons, check out this guide!
The tutorial above is TOTALLY FREE, and I hope you found it useful! But if this information really made your day, because it rescued you from hours of headache, or allowed you to accomplish something you thought was impossible, then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or pizza for my time and effort! Many thanks in advance!
Caja is a great file-manager, but one unfortunate limitation is that you can’t customise the toolbar in the Preferences dialogue. So, while there buttons for Home and Computer, there isn’t one for Network Locations, which some of you might find handy. However, you can in fact add new buttons, and remove unwanted ones, and I’ll show you how.
It comes down to specifying toolitems in the config file caja-navigation-window-ui.xml, and wherever you paste the code will determine where the button ends up. For example, if you add the code for your custom button after the entry for the Home button, that’s where it will end up; if you add it after all the default buttons, it will end up on the right end of the toolbar. So you can add your buttons where you want, reorder them as you please, and even get rid of unwanted ones.
Adding Network Locations Button
First off, open the file for editing with the following command:
The second half of the file deals with the toolbar, so locate the button you want to put your custom ones after. Hit Enter at the end of that line, and paste the code below into the empty paragraph beneath it, making sure to preserve the indent. For this example, I’m adding the code after the Computer button, but you can add it wherever you please.
<toolitem name="Go to Network" action="Go to Network"/>
Once you’ve added your custom button, save the file, then reload Caja (either by manually closing all windows, or running caja -q in the terminal, then opening Caja again). Your new toolbar button will be there and ready to use!
For info on how to Add or Remove Separators, Reorder Existing Buttons, and Remove Unwanted Buttons, check out this guide!
The tutorial above is TOTALLY FREE, and I hope you found it useful! But if this information really made your day, because it rescued you from hours of headache, or allowed you to accomplish something you thought was impossible, then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or pizza for my time and effort! Many thanks in advance!
Caja is a great file-manager, but one unfortunate limitation is that you can’t customise the toolbar in the Preferences dialogue. And one pair of buttons many would find invaluable are those for Undo and Redo, but they’re not part of the default toolbar. However, you can in fact add new buttons, and remove unwanted ones, and I’ll show you how.
It comes down to specifying toolitems in the config file caja-navigation-window-ui.xml, and wherever you paste the code will determine where the buttons end up. For example, if you add the code for your custom buttons after the entry for the Home button, that’s where they will end up; if you add them after all the default buttons, they will end up on the right end of the toolbar. So you can add your buttons where you want, reorder them as you please, and even get rid of unwanted ones.
Adding Undo and Redo Buttons
First off, open the file for editing with the following command:
The second half of the file deals with the toolbar, so locate the button you want to put your custom ones after. Hit Enter at the end of that line, and paste the code below into the empty paragraph beneath it, making sure to preserve the indent. For this example, I’m adding the code after the Computer button, but you can add it wherever you please.
Once you’ve added your custom buttons, save the file, then reload Caja (either by manually closing all windows, or running caja -q in the terminal, then opening Caja again). Your new toolbar buttons will be there and ready to use!
For info on how to Add or Remove Separators, Reorder Existing Buttons, and Remove Unwanted Buttons, check out this guide!
The tutorial above is TOTALLY FREE, and I hope you found it useful! But if this information really made your day, because it rescued you from hours of headache, or allowed you to accomplish something you thought was impossible, then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or pizza for my time and effort! Many thanks in advance!
Caja is a great file-manager, and unlike Nautilus it still has a toolbar, but one limitation is that you can’t customise the toolbar in the Preferences dialogue. However, you can in fact add new buttons, and remove unwanted ones, and I’ll show you how.
It comes down to specifying toolitems in the config file caja-navigation-window-ui.xml, and wherever you paste the code will determine where the buttons end up. For example, if you add the code for your custom buttons after the entry for the Home button, that’s where they will end up; if you add them after all the default buttons, they will end up on the right end of the toolbar. So you can add your buttons where you want, reorder them as you please, and even get rid of unwanted ones.
And here I’ll show you how to add 4 different buttons related to the deleting of files and managing the Trash/Rubbish/Bin (the naming of that folder can vary: in most screenshots of Caja I’ve seen it is Trash, whereas when I first installed Caja in KDE it was Bin, but when I log into my MATE desktop it’s displayed as Rubbish – so I’ll go with Trash in this tutorial, especially since that’s the term used in the code we’ll be adding).
These will be Open Trash, Move To Trash, Delete (bypass Trash and completely delete), and Empty Trash.
While it’s easy enough to hit the Delete key to move files and folders to the Trash, and to totally delete them it’s just Shift+Delete, having buttons for these can save you reaching for the keyboard if you’ve just selected files/folders with your mouse (I’ve found the Delete button to be more useful than I imagined). And while you can right-click Trash in Caja’s sidebar and choose Open, Open in New Tab, Open in New Window, and Empty Trash, having a button to open it in the current tab – or middle-click that button to open the Trash folder in a new tab (very handy!) – is quicker, and I’ve found the ability to empty the Trash simply by clicking a button to be extremely useful.
Adding the Delete & Various Trash Buttons
Here I’ll show you how to add all 4 buttons, but you can of course leave out buttons you have no use for, as well as rearrange their order. Personally, I don’t have one for Move to Trash (simply “Trash” in the code below), as hitting the delete key is quicker, but having one for Delete saves me from using both hands to hit the Shift+Delete combo. I middle-click the Open Trash button (“Go to Trash”) to open it in a new tab quite often, but leave that out if you don’t think you’ll use it. But most of us will probably find being able to Empty Trash via a toolbar button to be quite handy.
First off, open the file for editing with the following command:
The second half of the file deals with the toolbar, so locate the button you want to put your custom ones after. Hit Enter at the end of that line, and paste the code below into the empty paragraph beneath it, making sure to preserve the indent (if pasting the whole block at once, you’ll need to hit the spacebar a few times before the second line onwards so the indents line up).
<toolitem name="Go to Trash" action="Go to Trash"/>
<toolitem name="Trash" action="Trash"/>
<toolitem name="Delete" action="Delete"/>
<toolitem name="Empty Trash" action="Empty Trash"/>
Personally, I put these near the end of the toolbar, but you can add them wherever you please.
Once you’ve added your custom buttons, save the file, then reload Caja (either by manually closing all windows, or running caja -q in the terminal, then opening Caja again). Your new toolbar buttons will be there and ready to use!
For info on how to Add or Remove Separators, Reorder Existing Buttons, and Remove Unwanted Buttons, check out this guide!
The tutorial above is TOTALLY FREE, and I hope you found it useful! But if this information really made your day, because it rescued you from hours of headache, or allowed you to accomplish something you thought was impossible, then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or pizza for my time and effort! Many thanks in advance!
The Caja extension caja-open-terminal for opening a terminal with its path being the current folder is a must for most users. While you don’t even need this extension to achieve this (check my tutorial on how to achieve this with a script and have the terminal open with the F4 key!), for many of you being able to right-click inside a folder and click Open in Terminal is easy and vital.
But if you’ve changed icon themes a bit, you may have noticed that the one icon that doesn’t change is the one for Open in Terminal. While it’s not a huge deal, if it kind of annoys you, and you’d just rather have an icon of your choice for this, then keep reading.
Choosing a Replacement Icon
Ideally the icon should be 16x16px, but using a larger one will actually work, so no need to resize it. But if you’ve found a larger terminal icon that looks great, note that it might not look so hot when it’s shrunk down to that size in the menu. So keeping it fairly simple will probably give the best results, and if you’ve got a bunch of icon themes installed, you can do a search through the parent folder for “terminal” to see if there are 16px icons to your liking. And if you found the perfect icon but it’s an SVG vector, not a PNG file, don’t worry – just rename the extension to .png and it will work! That bottom icon in the image, the magenta inside a silver frame, is an SVG image, but as you can see it worked just fine.
Changing the Icon
If you look in /usr/share/caja/extensions the file libcaja-open-terminal.caja-extension mentions Icon=terminal at the top, but your current theme may not even have terminal.png or terminal.svg in it. It turns out it’s actually in Gnome’s default gnome icon theme, with the icon being in /usr/share/icons/gnome/16×16/apps, and terminal.png is actually a symbolic link to utilities-terminal.png in the same folder.
So open up that folder as administrator with:
gksu caja /usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/apps
Now rename your replacement icon to utilities-terminal.png and drag it into the folder, and OK the overwriting of the original file. Now just run caja -q to quit Caja – you will need to manually close the folder opened as administrator – and when you restart Caja, your new icon will be in the context-menu, as well as Caja’s File menu.
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The tutorial above is TOTALLY FREE, and I hope you found it useful! But if this information really made your day, because it rescued you from hours of headache, or allowed you to accomplish something you thought was impossible, then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or pizza for my time and effort! Many thanks in advance!
I think we can all agree that Caja is the best file-manager for Linux, being fast and easy to use, and retaining all those useful things the Gnome developers keep removing from Nautilus. And another awesome thing about Caja is how much you can customise it… though you can be forgiven for not knowing this, since the options available in Preferences are very few indeed.
However, you can in fact tailor Caja to your liking in many ways (check out my posts about adding all sorts of useful toolbar buttons!), and here we’ll be looking at how to add or remove separators in the toolbar, and how to reorder existing buttons, and remove unwanted ones.
First off, open Caja’s config file for editing with the following command:
The second half of the file deals with the toolbar, where you will see toolitem and separator entries, so let’s get started!
Adding & Removing Separators
If you want to add a separator anywhere, just add hit Enter after the preceding line, and insert <separator/> into the black paragraph, making sure to preserve the indent. Or if you want the reverse, to remove a separator, then delete that line (or you can comment it out – see Removing Unwanted Toolbar Buttons below). In this way you can add more separators, reorder them, or remove them entirely.
Reordering Caja’s Toolbar Buttons
If you want to reorder your buttons to your liking, it’s as easy as moving around the lines of code. As you can see in the picture above, I’ve switched around the lines of code for Home and Computer, so the Computer button comes before Home:
It’s as easy as that – you can have your toolbar buttons in any order you please simply by moving the lines of code around. Now to get rid of those buttons you can really do without…
Removing Unwanted Toolbar Buttons
If there are default toolbar buttons you can do without, simply delete the lines for them. Or, if you’d prefer to comment them out, just in case you want them back one day, note that being an .xml file, you can’t use a hash (#) to comment out lines like with scripts and other config files – that results in the entire toolbar disappearing. The correct syntax for XML files is to start the line off with a less-than symbol followed by an exclamation point and two dashes (<!--), then end the line with two dashes followed by a greater-than symbol (-->). In the following example, I’m commenting out the “Stop” button (which is useless in my opinion, and just taking up valuable space), and note that since there is already a greater-than symbol (>) at the end, all you need to do is insert two dashes (--) before it:
<!-- <toolitem name="Stop" action="Stop"/-->
You will see in the file that the line has been successfully commented out:
Saving Your Toolbar Tweaks
Once you’ve finished your toolbar customisations, save the file, then reload Caja, either by manually closing all windows, or running caja -q via Run Command or in the terminal, then opening Caja again.
So I hope this has been of use to you, and if you’d like to add a bunch of really useful new buttons not available by default, check out my other posts!
The tutorial above is TOTALLY FREE, and I hope you found it useful! But if this information really made your day, because it rescued you from hours of headache, or allowed you to accomplish something you thought was impossible, then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or pizza for my time and effort! Many thanks in advance!
As with any Linux file-manager, if you want to find out the properties of selected files and folders, you just need to hit Alt+Enter, or right-click and choose Properties . But if you’re selecting items with your mouse, it makes sense to have a toolbar button for this task, so you can quickly and easily click that, rather than have to initiate it via a key-combo. That way you can easily get information about the folder you’re in (if nothing is selected) or the selected file(s) and/or folder(s).
But one limitation of Caja is that you can’t customise the toolbar in the Preferences dialogue. However, you can in fact add new buttons, and remove unwanted ones, and I’ll show you how.
It comes down to specifying toolitems in the config file caja-navigation-window-ui.xml, and wherever you paste the code will determine where the button ends up. For example, if you add the code for your custom button after the entry for the Home button, that’s where it will end up; if you add it after all the default buttons, it will end up on the right end of the toolbar. So you can add your buttons where you want, reorder them as you please, and even get rid of unwanted ones.
Add Properties Button to Caja’s Toolbar
First off, open the file for editing with the following command:
The second half of the file deals with the toolbar, so locate the button you want to put your custom ones after. Hit Enter at the end of that line, and paste the code below into the empty paragraph beneath it, making sure to preserve the indent. I’ve added mine near the far end of the toolbar, but you can add it wherever you please.
<toolitem name="Properties" action="Properties"/>
Once you’ve added your custom button, save the file, then reload Caja (either by manually closing all windows, or running caja -q in the terminal, then opening Caja again). Your new toolbar button will be there and ready to use!
And if you want to add a separator anywhere, just add <separator/> in between the lines of the buttons (or if you want the reverse, to remove a separator, then delete that line).
If you want to reorder your buttons to your liking, it’s as easy as moving around the lines of code. And, lastly, if there are default toolbar buttons you can do without, simply delete the lines for them. Or, if you’d prefer to comment them out, note that being an .xml file, you can’t use a hash (#) – that results in the entire toolbar disappearing. The correct syntax for XML files is to start the line off with a less-than symbol followed by an exclamation point and two dashes (<!--), then end the line with two dashes followed by a greater-than symbol (-->). In the following example, I’m commenting out the “Stop” button (which is useless in my opinion, and just taking up valuable space), and note that since there is already a greater-than symbol (>) at the end, all you need to do is insert two dashes (--) before it:
<!-- <toolitem name="Stop" action="Stop"/-->
You will see in the file that the line has been successfully commented out:
Once you’ve finished your toolbar tweaks, you will of course need to reload Caja for the changes to take effect.
The tutorial above is TOTALLY FREE, and I hope you found it useful! But if this information really made your day, because it rescued you from hours of headache, or allowed you to accomplish something you thought was impossible, then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or pizza for my time and effort! Many thanks in advance!
Caja is a great file-manager, and one feature that many use, and that Nautilus discarded aeons ago, is the Split View option to open another pane in the same window. Personally, I’ve never been a huge fan of that, preferring to drag files, etc, to another tab, or entirely new window. So for those of us who prefer this approach, it makes sense to have toolbar buttons for Open New Tab and Open New Window.
But one limitation of Caja is that you can’t customise the toolbar in the Preferences dialogue. However, you can in fact add new buttons, and remove unwanted ones, and I’ll show you how.
It comes down to specifying toolitems in the config file caja-navigation-window-ui.xml, and wherever you paste the code will determine where the buttons end up. For example, if you add the code for your custom buttons after the entry for the Home button, that’s where they will end up; if you add them after all the default buttons, they will end up on the right end of the toolbar. So you can add your buttons where you want, reorder them as you please, and even get rid of unwanted ones.
Add “Open New Tab” and “Open New Window” Buttons
First off, open the file for editing with the following command:
The second half of the file deals with the toolbar, so locate the button you want to put your custom ones after. Hit Enter at the end of that line, and paste the code below into the empty paragraph beneath it, making sure to preserve the indent. Personally, I put these near the end of the toolbar, but you can put them wherever you please, and you can of course reverse the order of those two buttons, or just add one of them.
Once you’ve added your custom buttons, save the file, then reload Caja (either by manually closing all windows, or running caja -q in the terminal, then opening Caja again). Your new toolbar buttons will be there and ready to use!
And if you want to add a separator anywhere, just add <separator/> in between the lines of the buttons (or if you want the reverse, to remove a separator, then delete that line).
If you want to reorder your buttons to your liking, it’s as easy as moving around the lines of code. And, lastly, if there are default toolbar buttons you can do without, simply delete the lines for them. Or, if you’d prefer to comment them out, note that being an .xml file, you can’t use a hash (#) – that results in the entire toolbar disappearing. The correct syntax for XML files is to start the line off with a less-than symbol followed by an exclamation point and two dashes (<!--), then end the line with two dashes followed by a greater-than symbol (-->). In the following example, I’m commenting out the “Stop” button (which is useless in my opinion, and just taking up valuable space), and note that since there is already a greater-than symbol (>) at the end, all you need to do is insert two dashes (--) before it:
<!-- <toolitem name="Stop" action="Stop"/-->
You will see in the file that the line has been successfully commented out:
Once you’ve finished your toolbar tweaks, you will of course need to reload Caja for the changes to take effect.
The tutorial above is TOTALLY FREE, and I hope you found it useful! But if this information really made your day, because it rescued you from hours of headache, or allowed you to accomplish something you thought was impossible, then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or pizza for my time and effort! Many thanks in advance!
When adding (or editing) accelerators (keyboard shortcuts) for tasks in Caja by editing its accels file, you need to first quit Caja, otherwise you’ll likely find it keeps trying to write to the file. And running caja -q is probably not enough, but using pkill -KILL caja should do the trick. And for most people defining new hotkeys for tasks in Caja, that’s all it takes.
HOWEVER, I had an absolute nightmare with this, because even with Caja killed, something (ie: Caja) was still trying to write to accels, as evidenced by:
… coming up while defining the accelerator. So even with reloading and saving, or choosing not to reload then saving, it wasn’t happening. I’d find the semi-colon and space I had deleted from the beginning of the line back again, and even when that stopped happening, the key I had assigned as the accelerator had been deleted. So, I was in this constant loop of editing the file and saving it, and instead of the shortcut working immediately, I was lucky if I got it recognised after a few minutes of this, and the worst was one that still didn’t stick after 2 days!
And I did try killing Caja more than once, but the results were random. So I decided to try killing Caja before editing accels, during multiple times, then after saving accels, and then finally the keyboard shortcuts worked immediately.
So if anyone else is having the difficulties getting custom keyboard shortcuts to work immediately, then the plan of attack is to open accels in one terminal, and have another terminal open to kill Caja, which you can then easily repeat by hitting the up-arrow and Enter:
First totally kill Caja:
pkill -KILL caja
Then open the accels file in another terminal window with:
pluma ~/.config/caja/accels
Totally kill Caja (AGAIN) – just hit the up-arrow to bring back the last command:
pkill -KILL caja
Remove the semi-colon and space from the beginning of the line you’re going to edit, then Save.
Totally kill Caja (AGAIN):
pkill -KILL caja
Add your accelerator to the end of the entry, then Save.
Totally kill Caja (AGAIN):
pkill -KILL caja
If your text editor says the file has changed, click the Reload button, check your edits are still there, and edit them again if not.
Totally kill Caja (AGAIN):
pkill -KILL caja
Now Save the file, exit, and finally:
Totally kill Caja (AGAIN):
pkill -KILL caja
All that killing Caja might seem excessive, and like I am being cheeky, but seriously it is quicker and easier to just have another terminal open, hit the up arrow, and repeat the kill command than go through the hellish alternative. Now you should find your new hotkey works immediately after starting Caja again.
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The tutorial above is TOTALLY FREE, and I hope you found it useful! But if this information really made your day, because it rescued you from hours of headache, or allowed you to accomplish something you thought was impossible, then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or pizza for my time and effort! Many thanks in advance!
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