Sensible Shortcuts in Ubuntu

November 30, 2008 by John Jenkins · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Tools 

I find the standard shortcuts in Ubuntu fairly useless. They don’t take me to the location they point at in the way that (for example) Windows shortcuts do. Once you have followed a shortcut, you cannot traverse the directory tree as in Windows. If you followed a shortcut to /u/websites/blog and then went to the parent directory, rather than pointing at /u/websites you end up back at the desktop. Not helpful.

There is a way of getting reasonable shortcuts. You need to create a location launcher. First, right click on the desktop which will bring up the menu in figure 1. Select the Type: location and enter a name and a location as in figure 2. Once you have created the launcher, arrange it on the desktop.

Instructions on creating a launcher

You can edit the launcher’s details in a text editor after it has been created. It will be stored in $HOME/Desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=pages
Type=Link
Icon[en_GB]=gnome-panel-launcher
URL=/u/websites/pages
Name[en_GB]=pages
Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/gnome-folder.png

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