Quick Support Tool: Nautilus ‘Send Path and Filename’ Extension

It happens quite often in my household that I am asked to have a look at an Office document to help with formatting and other things. More often than not the solution to the problem does not come easy and I prefer to work on the solution at my own desk. That means that the file has to be copied, which can be done in many different ways, but that’s usually time-consuming. Since I usually have file system access to the device, I have wished for a long time that I could just send myself a message that contains the path and name for the file in question. So when I had a bit of time recently, I put together an add-on for the Linux Nautilus and Nemo file managers to do just that.

And here’s how it looks like with the source code and installation and configuration instructions on my Codeberg page:

Effective, but not very spectacular, just a little dialog box that appears when selecting the ‘Send support request’ entry from the context menu for a file or directory entry in the Nautilus or Nemo file manager. For asynchronous support, the input field can be used to add additional text for the ‘support request’.

The plug-in just collects the information and then uses any 3rd party http post capable messaging service to forward the message. The two options I can recommend here are Gotify and an XMPP server that supports http push messages.