Linux Mint 19.2 Will Bring Improvements to Cinnamon and Nemo

Cinnamon is Linux Mint's flagship desktop environment. Started as a Gnome 3 fork, now it is fully independent. Cinnamon brings modern technologies to the Linux desktop while retains the classic desktop paradigm with the taskbar, the app menu, and traditional window management. In addition to the new features revealed with the GitHub release of Cinnamon 4.2, there are a number of other improvements made to this DE and its primary file manager, Nemo.

Here are the changes in Cinnamon and Nemo. Before proceeding, check out What's new in Cinnamon 4.2.

Nemo: Pinning items

The Cinnamon file manager, Nemo, now allows pinning files and folders to the top of the file list. This a convenient way to access your important documents faster.

Nemo: Conditional actions

When you right-click a file, you see the actions you can perform on it. Until now these actions could only be generic. Starting with Nemo 4.2, actions can implement their own external condition. Now actions can use scripts or external commands to target specific files under specific conditions.

Generic actions work as follows. When you right-click a picture, you can choose the “Set as Wallpaper” action. This action targets all pictures files. No matter what file you select, if it’s a picture file, you’ll see this action.

Conditional actions: If you right-click an .mkv which is larger than 4GB, the context menu can show a “Split it” command which doesn't appear for smaller files. If you select a video which audio is encoded as DTS, the right-click context menu may show “Convert DTS audio to AC3”. And so on.

In future releases developers are going to assess the performance costs of shipping a multitude of actions. With Nemo 4.2, actions can predict whether they’re needed or not way better than they could ever do in the past, and that will allow action creators to make the right-click menu in the file manager one of the handiest tools in Cinnamon.

Cinnamon menu

Cinnamon is faster and snappier than before. It uses less RAM and it loads faster. Some of these improvements come from the DocInfo and Appsys reviews, some come from the Muffin window manager, and some come from the work done on the application menu. The are covered here:

Cinnamon 4.2 Desktop Environment is out

Beside the performance improvements the application menu now identifies and distinguishes duplicates. If two applications have the same name, the menu will show more information about them.

By default, the application menu shows the Xed app simply as “Text Editor”. If you install Gedit, you no longer end up with two “Text Editor” entries. Instead, you’ll see “Text Editor (Xed)” and “Text Editor (Gedit)”.

The same goes for Flatpaks, if you install a Flatpak app package that you already have installed via the package manager, the menu will distinguish between the two to let you know which one is the one from the repositories and which one is the Flatpak.

Scrollbar settings

A new option allows disable the annoying overlay scrollbars feature that makes them disappear on mouse leave.

Xapps

Pix, along with the text editor, the document reader, the video player and the image viewer were reviewed and support was added to ensure users could use the traditional Ctrl+Q and Ctrl+W keyboard shortcuts.

In the document reader preferences, a zoom selector can now be added to the toolbar.

These are the great improvements made to the Cinnamon DE and its apps. The Linux Mint 19.2 release should be really exciting.

Source: The Linux Mint Blog