Ever wanted to annotate files and/or folders inside of Nautilus? There’s a new third-party Nautilus extension that allows you to do exactly that.
Nautilus (also known as GNOME Files these days) used to have a built-in “notes” feature. This allows you to attach short written annotations to files and directories on your system, and view/edit/access them at a later date. This (admittedly little-known) feature seems to have been removed in Nautilus 3.2 back in 2011.
Well, this week I found a new Nautilus extension that brings this (admittedly niche) feature back, and it works with the latest versions of GNOME’s famed file manager. When installed, you are able to annotate files, directories, and even storage devices with custom text inside of the file manager itself:
The text area even supports Markdown with basic on-canvas preview of markdown formatting.
After writing a note I found it necessary to press ctrl + s. If i closing the text canvas after entering text is did not, in my experience, automatically save the text. However, automatic saving does seem to work for others, so YMMV.
As well as written notes the Nautilus Annotations extension allows you to badge notes/files with emblems. Click the ‘tag’ icon in the upper-left corner of the note canvas to access a palette of pictographs to choose from:
So how does this extension work? To quote from the the project README:
“Nautilus Annotations […] exploits the same machinery that was used [in the past]: that of relying on GIO to store custom information about a file or a directory. Each annotation is stored as a metadata::annotation entry in GIO’s database.”
Because of this implementation moving or renaming a file does not affect existing annotations; move a file or directory elsewhere and the annotations go with it to its new path. Annotations are also “per user”. Shared files that have annotations will only show those annotations for the user who made them.
Files and folders with annotations display a small badge/emblem next in the main Nautilus viewport. To view an annotation you (rather un-intuitively, imo) have to select the ‘edit annotation’ option in the right-click context menu for that file/folder.
Want to remove an annotation and any emblems? There’s a handy menu entry to erase annotations (with a confirmation dialog to avoid any accidents).
Alternatively, just erase all text on the canvas when editing an annotation and hit ctrl + s to save. The extension then erases the database entry, reverting the file/folder back to a note-less one.
So why might you want to annotate files or folders? To be honest, I’m not sure. I get by on descriptive file names and, if more info is needed, put it in a txt file nearby. However, this may be difficult (similar file/folder names, etc), it’s also messy (more files in view). But as an alternative to opening files to see what’s inside, this could help.
You can find the source code for Nautilus Annotations on Gitlab. There are no pre-built installers to download so you’ll want to grab the source, extract, and then compile it manually.
Building this extension from source on Ubuntu 22.10 was easy it just required a bunch of dependencies. Run ./bootstrap, see what packages it says are missing, install them, and repeat until you can run ./configure.
Once happy, run sudo make install and ran nautilus -q and et voila, ‘Annotation Directory’ and ‘Annotate File’ menu options. To uninstall just revisit the build directory and run sudo make uninstall.
Using an Arch-based Linux distro? You’ll find Nautilus Annotations in the AUR.