Thunar
From the project home page:
- Thunar is a modern file manager for the Xfce Desktop Environment. Thunar has been designed from the ground up to be fast and easy-to-use. Its user interface is clean and intuitive, and does not include any confusing or useless options by default. Thunar is fast and responsive with a good start up time and folder load time.
Installation
Install the thunar package. Thunar is part of the xfce4 group and the default file manager of the xfce desktop environment.
Plugins and addons
- Gnome Virtual File System — For trash support, mounting removable media, and remote filesystems (
mtp/smb). See File manager functionality#Mounting for more details.
- Thunar Archive Plugin — Plugin which allows you to create and extract archive files using contextual menu items. It does not create or extract archives directly, but instead acts as a frontend for other programs such as File Roller (file-roller), Ark (ark), Xarchiver (xarchiver) or Engrampa (engrampa). Part of xfce4-goodies.
- libgsf — The GNOME Structured File Library is a utility library for reading and writing structured file formats. Install if you need support for odf thumbnails.
- https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Libgsf || libgsf
- RAW thumbnailer — A lightweight and fast raw image thumbnailer that is needed to display raw thumbnails.
- https://code.google.com/archive/p/raw-thumbnailer/ || raw-thumbnailerAUR
Configuration
Apart from the Edit > Preferences configuration UI, use to see Thunar's hidden configuration values. To configure the default terminal, set it either in Edit > Configure custom actions... or tell which default terminal to use,
To configure the keybindings, edit the file .
Thunar Volume Manager
While Thunar supports automatic mounting and unmounting of removable media (gvfs package is required), the Thunar Volume Manager allows extended functionality, such as automatically running commands or automatically opening a Thunar window for mounted media. For mobile devices, which generally follow MTP, an additional package is required.
Installation
Thunar Volume Manager can be installed from the package in the official repositories.
Configuration
It can also be configured to execute certain actions when cameras and audio players are connected. After installing the plugin:
- Launch Thunar and go to Edit > Preferences
- Under the 'Advanced' tab, check 'Enable Volume Management'
- Click configure and check the following items:
- Mount removable drives when hot-plugged.
- Mount removable media when inserted.
- Also make desired changes (see the example below)
Here's an example setting for making Amarok play an audio CD.
Multimedia - Audio CDs:
Tips and tricks
Using Thunar to browse remote locations
Since Xfce 4.8 (Thunar 1.2) it is possible to browse remote locations (such as FTP servers or Samba shares) directly in Thunar. To enable this functionality, ensure that gvfs, and packages are installed. A 'Network' entry is visible in Thunar's side bar and remote locations can be opened by using the following URI schemes in the location dialog (opened with ): smb://, ftp://, ssh://, sftp://, davs:// & followed by the server hostname or IP address.
There is no URI scheme for NFS shares, but Thunar can issue a command if you setup your fstab properly.
What is important here is the which prevents the share from being mounted until you click on it, user which allows any user to mount (and unmount) the share, which makes network connectivity a pre-requisite, and finally, which puts the mounting operation in the background so if your server requires some spin-up time, you will not have to deal with time out messages and re-clicking until it works.
- If you want to permanently store passphrases of remote filesystem locations, you have to install GNOME Keyring.
- It can be necessary to specify the mountpoint as a subfolder to
/mediain order for Thunar to display the new device for any non-root user.
Starting in daemon mode
Thunar may be run in daemon mode. This has several advantages, including a faster startup for Thunar, Thunar running in the background and only opening a window when necessary (for instance, when a flash drive is inserted), and letting Thunar handle automatic mounting of removable media.
Make sure the command is autostarted on login. See Xfce and Autostarting for more details.
Solving problem with slow cold start
Some people still have problems with Thunar taking a long time to start for the first time. This is due to gvfs checking the network, preventing Thunar from starting until gvfs finishes its operations. To change this behaviour, edit and change to .
Hide Shortcuts in Side Pane
There is a hidden menu to hide Shortcuts in the Side Pane.
Right click in the Side Pane where there are no shortcuts, like on the DEVICES section label. Then you will get a pop-up menu where you can uncheck items you do not want displayed.
Assign keyboard shortcuts in Thunar
Showing partitions defined in fstab
By default, Thunar will not show in devices any partitions defined in besides the root partition.
We can change that by adding the option to fstab for the partition we wish to show.
Custom actions
This section covers useful custom actions which can be accessed through Edit -> Configure custom actions and which are stored in . More examples are listed in the thunar wiki. Furthermore, this blog post provides a comprehensive collection of custom actions.
Search for files and folders
To use this action, you need to have installed. The and dependencies are optional for users that want to use a prebuilt index database.
| Name | Command | File patterns | Appears if selection contains |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search | catfish --path=%f | * | Directories |
Scan for viruses
To use this action, you need to have and installed.
| Name | Command | File patterns | Appears if selection contains |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scan for virus | * | Select all |
Link to Dropbox
| Name | Command | File patterns | Appears if selection contains |
|---|---|---|---|
| Link to Dropbox | * | Directories, other files |
Please note that when using many custom actions to symlink files and folder to a particular place, it might be useful to put them into the Send To folder of the context menu to avoid that the menu itself gets bloated. This is fairly easy to achieve and requires a .desktop file in for each action to perform. Say we want to put the above Dropbox symlink action into Send To, we create a with the following content. The new applied action will be active after restarting Thunar.
Troubleshooting
Automounting of large external drives
If Thunar refuses to mount large removable media (size > 1TB) although thunar-volman and gvfs have been installed, then try installing a different automounter such as or . The latter should be preferred as it uses udisks2 and thus is compatible with gvfs. To start udiskie with udisks2 support, add the following line to your autostart file:
udiskie -2 &
Tumblerd hangs up, uses too much CPU
Tumblerd, the service that watches the file system and notifies the system when a thumbnail needs to be made, may get stuck in a loop, using 100% of the system's CPU; see the bug report. The following script is a temporary workaround to stop this from happening. Copy, and paste this into a .sh file, save it somewhere in your home directory, mark the file as executable and then set up the system to autostart it at system startup.
Trash/network icons disappear randomly
Make sure all Thunar instances start after gvfs. For , you can create a wrapper that waits until GVFS is active:
Not authenticated to mount filesystems
Thunar new window or tab being too slow to open
It might be the case that you have many files under the folder that you have set to be the XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR. See XDG user directories.
The solution is to move files from whatever folder is the XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR to another one, or set the XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR to another folder.
See also
- Thunar project page
- Thunar Volume Manager project page
- This list of plugins
- Several settings, like showing the full path in the title, are available through . See this list for more details.