File notes tab gone in Nautilus 3.2.1

Question

It seems that the "Notes" tab in the "File Properties" dialog is gone in Nautilus 3.2.1/Ubuntu 11.10. How can you use the notes feature now? What do you do about notes that you have already made? Is there a patch or an extension for this, or is it planning to be fixed in the future? (Why was it removed?) (Related question about portability of notes.)

Answer 1

A similar question to this was asked from "Emblems and Backgrounds" and I'm afraid its a similar answer.

The Gnome Devs thought these capabilities were rarely used and in-order to streamline the codebase they removed this as core GUI functionality.

Fortunately, the same terminal based commands can be used since the metadata capabilities have been retained:

for example, here is a v11.10 nautilus screen-shot with notes added via the command line.

As to "is it planning to be fixed" - again a similar answer - like "emblems" - this is regarded as third-party supported - i.e. not core nautilus capabilities.

I'm not aware of anybody deciding to take on this challenge - so here is my poor substitute:

Choosing the right-click menu option Notes displays the notes for a file which you can amend.

To do this I used my answer to this Q&A to execute the following file:

#!/bin/bash

# basic - and I mean basic bash script to display & set notes
# 
# feel free to enhance!
#
# fossfreedom (askubuntu)  27/12/11

notestext=`gvfs-info $1 | grep annotation | sed s/' metadata::annotation: '/''/g`

newnotes=`zenity --entry --width=500 --title=$1 --text="current notes:" --entry-text="$notestext"`

# handle the case where the user has pressed cancel

if [ $? = 1 ]; then 
  exit
fi

# ok - got this far - lets change the notes for the file selected

gvfs-set-attribute -t string $1 metadata::annotation "$newnotes"

Zenity doesn't support multiple line entry - a more robust pythondialog type implementation will be required... my python skills aren't up-to this job though!

Answer 2

Here is the script that I threw together for use with @fossfreedom's answer. It uses GIO to interface to GVFS and Tkinter for the GUI, and is written in Python 2.7. It supports multi-line annotations. The GUI looks like this:

prerequisites You need to install tkinter:

sudo apt-get install python-tk

to use

Save the code as a file using your favourite editor in a known folder location - for example /home/[home-folder-name]/scripts/notesscript

Then - if you are using naultilus-actions, use a command:

python /home/[home-folder-name]/scripts/notesscript

The code:

import gio
class GVFSNotes:
    ATTRIBUTE_KEY = 'metadata::annotation'
    def __init__(self, f):
        self.__f = f
    def _get_attribute(self, key):
        return self.__f.query_info(key).get_attribute_string(key)
    def _make_setter(self, key, val):
        info = gio.FileInfo()
        info.set_attribute_string(key, val)
        return info
    def _set_attribute(self, key, val):
        self.__f.set_attributes_from_info(self._make_setter(key, val))
    def get(self):
        return self._get_attribute(self.ATTRIBUTE_KEY)
    def set(self, val):
        self._set_attribute(self.ATTRIBUTE_KEY, val)
import Tkinter as tk
class Dialog:
    def __init__(self, title, initial):
        self.root = tk.Tk()
        self.text = None
        self._mkGUI(title, initial)
    def settext(self):
        self.text = self.entry.get(1.0, tk.END).rstrip()
    def onCancel(self):
        self.root.destroy()
    def onOkay(self):
        self.settext()
        self.root.destroy()
    def _mkButtons(self):
        (tk.Button(self.root, text="Cancel", width=10, command=self.onCancel)
            .pack(side=tk.LEFT)
        )
        (tk.Button(self.root, text="Okay", width=10, command=self.onOkay)
            .pack(side=tk.RIGHT)
        )
    def _mkEntry(self, initial):
        self.entry = tk.Text(self.root, width=60)
        if initial != '' and initial != None:
            self.entry.insert(tk.END, initial)
        self.entry.pack(fill=tk.X, expand=True)
        self.entry.focus_set()
    def _setTitle(self, title):
        self.root.wm_title(title)
    def _mkGUI(self, title, initial):
        self._mkEntry(initial)
        self._mkButtons()
        self._setTitle(title)
    def show(self):
        self.root.mainloop()
        return self.text
def main(path):
    notes = GVFSNotes(gio.File(path))
    oldtext = notes.get()
    newtext = Dialog('Notes for ' + path, oldtext).show()
    if newtext != None and newtext != oldtext:
        notes.set(newtext)
if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys
    main(sys.argv[1])

Answer 3

Here is my script for use with nautilus-scripts (rather bit rough - limited for 1000000 lines, I am not programmer).

You have to create in ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts file (named e.g. nautilus-annotations) and make it executable (in properties) with these content:

#!/bin/bash
for arg do
if i=`gvfs-info "$arg" | grep -A 1000000 metadata::annotation: | sed s/\metadata::annotation:\// | grep -v metadata:: | zenity  --text-info --editable  --ok-label="ok" --cancel-label="cancel" --checkbox="change"`; then `gvfs-set-attribute -t string "$arg" metadata::annotation "$i"`; else exit
fi
done

Answer 4

I had slightly modified your solution. It has been merged into "nautilus actions extra". In the next release, the package will be named: nautilus-notes.