Open Location from anywhere

[peloy chapus net (Eloy A. Paris)]

Hello,

A lot of times I would like to be able to just press a keyboard shortcut
and get the Nautilus Open Location dialog (the one you get with
Control-L in a Nautilus window). This would be very handy when you want
to quickly open a specific folder that is not in your home directory.

It is the window manager the one that should intercept the keyboard
shortcut and tell Nautilus to present the Open Location dialog, of
course. The problem is that there is no way to tell Nautilus to open
this dialog. A command-line switch for this would be nice.

Currently, I have the following script:

===================================
#!/bin/sh
 
location=`zenity --title "Open Location" --entry --text "Location:"`
 
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    # Only open the location if the user pressed the "Ok" button
    nautilus --no-desktop "$location"
fi
===================================

I configured Metacity to run this script when Shift-Control-L is
pressed. It works like a charm, but I think using Nautilus' own Open
Location dialog would be better since 1) we would have tab completion,
and 2) we would benefit from future improvements to this dialog.

It'd be great if Metacity could run Nautilus like "nautilus
--open-location". Nautilus would present the Open Location dialog, the
user would enter a location and click Ok and Nautilus would open that
location. The user clicks Cancel and Nautilus would do nothing.

The current alternative to using the script above and the Metacity
shortcut would be to: press the "Show Desktop" button, open the home
folder, press control-L there, enter location, press Ok. You get the
location you want, but also your home folder window remains open. Not as
efficient.

The other possibility, not as elegant and efficient, is that when the
desktop windows is selected Nautilus pays attention to Control-L (right
now you click on the desktop and press Control-L and nothing happens.)

Comments?

Eloy.-