Bdtyktl

I miss those pins I make in Windows.

How can I do the same in Ubuntu 17.10 with GNOME 3?

Follow the steps below.

1. 
   

   Create a .desktop file (say custom-filemanager.desktop) in ~/.local/share/applications. You can do this by running the following command in Terminal

   
   
   

   touch ~/.local/share/applications/custom-filemanager.desktop
   
   

   
   


2. 
   

   Open the .desktop file using a text-editor, for example by running

   
   
   

   gedit ~/.local/share/applications/custom-filemanager.desktop
   
   

   
   


3. 
   

   Add the following lines to the file:

   
   
   

   [Desktop Entry]
   
   Name=File Manager
   
   Comment=Access and organize files
   
   Keywords=folder;manager;explore;disk;filesystem;
   
   Exec=nautilus --new-window %U
   
   Icon=org.gnome.Nautilus
   
   Terminal=false
   
   Type=Application
   
   Categories=GNOME;GTK;Utility;Core;FileManager;
   
   Actions=new-window;open-downloads;
   
   
   
   [Desktop Action new-window]
   
   Name=New Window
   
   Exec=nautilus --new-window
   
   [Desktop Action open-downloads]
   
   Name=Open my Downloads folder
   
   Exec=nautilus /home/YOUR-USER-NAME/Downloads
   
   

   
   
   

   Replace YOUR-USER-NAME by your user-name in the last line.

   
   



4. Save the file.




5. Click on "Activities" and search for "File Manager". It should appear.




6. Right click on the "File Manager" and select "Add to Favourites". It should be added to the dock.

Now if you right click on the newly added File Manager icon in the dock, you should see a "Open my Downloads folder" option which should work as expected.

Similarly you can add shortcuts to other locations by adding new Desktop Actions and adding the name of the action to the Actions= line. For more info see this.

It's not prefect for what you seek, but you might be interested in the Gno-Menu extension.

The extension adds a quite configurable menu. The following shows it's default:

The recent documents I have accessed are shown on the right. The shortcuts on the left are set to the Places of Nautilus. The highlighted folder shortcut is to a folder I have "pinned" in Nautilus.

The Recents overview does not seem to support viewed folders. I don't know how the "Link to Intro etc." link got in there. Creating a new link to a folder and opening it did not put the folder there, and roaming in Nautilus does not affect Recents (until you open a file).

The right-hand side can also be configured to show your Favorites from the overview, where you could then add .desktop entries for Nautilus to open specific folders. (See pomsky's answer, but use Exec=nautilus /home/user/folder/ --new-window %U and include only the [Desktop Entry] part.)

As we can pin only Application to Gnome Dock, the best available option here is creating an application launcher that will open the favorite directory directly with a single mouse click.

So in order to do that navigate to activities and search for "Main menu". Now you will get a window titled Main menu.

Click on New item. and You will get a small window and fill the fields like described below.

In the given example i am pinning my Videos directory to Dock.

And now it will be shown at the bottom of the main menu window like this

.

Click on close button and again go to activities and search for the the "Name" provided. In my case its "My Videos". Single click on that and just drag and drop it to the Gnome dock.

Now You will get the shortcut on your Dock.

If you click on that you will get your favorite directory which you set opened by nautilus.

Tweaks

You can do more tweaks like changing the icon of the application launcher you want while creating the shortcut of even after creating the shortcut and pinning it.

After tweaking my shortcut(My Videos) is like this.