x-special/nautilus-clipboard workaround

More information on this here
Unfortunately, to support desktop icons, the developers introduced this clipboard feature that is an issue for most of us. This was about a year ago and not only affects gnome (as to this date, doesn’t support it), but also will affect other desktop environments that use nautilus.

The plan is to support the integration between Nautilus and desktop icons extension in the best way possible. Of course trade-offs are always present, and this was one of them. The plan is to eventually work in GNOME Shell to have support for clipboard handling as the integration between desktop icons and Nautilus needs.

Of course, you can always go back to the good old thunar, dolphin, or nemo… but fortunately, there is a workaround in naulitus!

Install xsel.

Place a file called copy_path.sh in your ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts with this content

echo -n "$NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS" | xsel -b -i

Mark the file with as executable.

Now when right clicking, you can do scripts->copy_path, this will copy the paths without the x-special.

You can’t bind nautilus actions scripts to shortcuts, so you wont be able to replace Ctrl+C, but at least this gets us the usual behavior.

EDIT: Although this workaround does the trick, I downloaded Thunar (I haven’t use it for a almost a decade) and It was a pleasant surprise to see the current state of it.
I think i will be going back to thunar 🙂