open file in directory action

[Vincent Gerris]

*Dear fellow freedesktop users,*
*
*
*As a longtime Linux Desktop user (currently Ubuntu 13.04) I continuously
look for ways to make Linux even better on the desktop.
I often do that by comparing it to the commercial vendors and listening to
user feedback from my environment (especially from those I freed from
Windows :) ).
One of the things I came across was the way the filemanager behaves after
selecting a file and choosing show in folder.
The best example I can think of, is when a file is downloaded in Firefox
and the user action "Open Containing Folder" is used.
On Mac OS X and Windows, when this action is used, the folder is opened in
the file manager and the file where the action was applied on, is selected.
In Linux (more specific Fedora 17 and Ubuntu 13.04 and probably most other
distro's), only the folder is shown, while the file is not selected.
>From a user point of view, that can be very disappointing, because you
would have to find that file among a possible big pile of other files.

*
*I discussed with somebody who has quite some knowledge of the matter (and
a lot of other Linux matters :), Hans de Goede ) and together we tried some
things to see if this is possible in Linux and if so, how.
We made an assumption: xdg-open is used to select the file. That should be
double checked.
Looking in that direction, we found that xdg-open does not provide a way to
select a file in a folder.
While nautilus is able to do this, as are konquerer and dolphin, only
Thunar does not seem to have a way to do this.

My question and partly proposal to developers would be to implement such
functionality.
For example, a command xdg-open-file-in-directory which will have similar
functionality as xdg-open, but with functionality that will select the file
that is being called upon.
If the filemanager used does not have such functionality, it can behave as
would xdg-open.
If I understand correctly, that would involve adding an additional mime
type, is that correct?

I am fairly new to making this kind of request, so I hope it is usable.
I would love to see this happen and I am happy to help.
If this can be done, I would be interested in finding an effective way to
have developers use this in their applications where applicable.*
*
*
*Kind regards,*
*Vincent*
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