Use case for scripts in Nautulis
Just forwarding here as confidential (it was a private email) one of the useful use cases for scripts in Nautilus. Quoting:
Hello Carlos,
Attached a script with a very basic and rough skeleton example of what basically my scripts do.
It's just an quick "if this then that" script. Uses zenity to:
- display a dialog with a list from which to choose what formats to build from the source files
- display a dialog with question whether to deploy the built files afterwards
- and to pop up desktop notifications about progress and completion
You can run this script and it will just show the dialogs and notifications, it doesn't actually do anything else.
I use such scripts for building HTML, PDF and other document format files from markdown sources with pandoc. Each script uses pandoc arguments and custom template files specific to the file format and project I'm working on (like using fonts, colors, styles and images to meet what the client is using on their website). Pandoc can't do everything I need so I almost always have a list of pre- and post-processing commands to do additional things. Like using mustache to load and transform json data sets into the output document. Or generating graph images from data sets for inclusion. So the dialog may also have an option like "regenerate graphs".
Anyway, it's just very convenient for creating content if the user can use scripts to tiecommands together for automating such things. I don't work on the terminal, I work on documents with a Nautilus window open on my project directory. Being able to launch a script to get a simple GUI and desktop notifications is convenient.
You could compare it with application developers using an IDE and build tool? Except for this there isn't and IDE or build tool that does everything I need for content creation. But I get a long way by being able to script it.
Regards, Jake