The file manager I’m using on my Plasma 6 system,
Dolphin, has built-in support for
remote folders via the KIO framework.
Where before I was relying on sshfs mount
points in /etc/fstab, I decided to try out the Dolphin way and set up my
remote devices using its sftp backend.
After a couple of days now I can say that this works beautifully… until you want to access the remote device on something that does not interface with KIO. This is especially important for me (and others) since I want to be able to browse networked filesystems via my terminal and have the ability to directly open a terminal in that location through Dolphin, something which is not possible with the KIO backend.
So in the end I went back to mount points in /etc/fstab. One small problem
remained, however, and that was the way those mount points were displayed
within Dolphin. There seemed to be no way to customize a mount point’s name or
icon, leading to an annoyingly long /home/wolf/net/hosts/coleridge entry in
the Devices section of Dolphin’s places panel.
I couldn’t find any help in fstab(5), and indeed I had never heard of a way
to give a mount point a “pretty name”. However, after a bit of searching, I
found people offhandedly mentioning the x-gvfs-name option. Some more
searching revealed that nobody seems to care about documenting these features,
but I was finally able to find an authoritative source within gvfs
itself.
Happily there’s not only x-gvfs-name but also support for custom icons
through x-gvfs-icon. So, if you want your file manager to display a pretty
name and icon for one of your mount points, simply add the following to the
relevant entry in /etc/fstab:
x-gvfs-name=My%20Device,x-gvfs-icon=network-server
This should be possible at least on GNOME and KDE desktops. I imagine a bunch of other environments and programs silently support this behaviour as well.
