Thunar is a new modern file manager for the Xfce Desktop Environment, Part II

File Management Preferences

Use the File Manager Preferences dialog to set your Thunar file manager preferences. To open the preferences dialog, choose Edit → Preferences... from the menu bar, or click on the File Manager button in the Xfce Settings Manager.

The File Manager Preferences dialog is divided into four pages with different options, each described in a separate section below. Basically you can set preferences in the following categories:

• The default settings for the views.

• The default settings for the side pane.

• The behavior of the file manager windows.

• Advanced features of the file manager.

Thunar also supports a bunch of so-called Hidden Options, which control several advanced features of the file manager, but are not included in the preferences in order to keep the preferences dialog simple. The README.thunarrc file that is included with the Thunar distribution describes all available options in detail.

Views Preferences

You can specify a default view, select sort options and display options. You can also specify whether thumbnails should be displayed for file types that support this.

View new folder using

Select the default view for folders. When you open a new window, the is displayed in the view that you select. This can be either the icon view, the compact list view or the detailed list view. You can also select Last Active View here to use the view you used for the last active window.

Sort folders before files

Select this option to list folders before files when you sort a folder.

Show thumbnails

Select this option to show thumbnails of image files and other supported files. The file manager stores the thumbnail files for each folder in the hidden .thumbnails directory in the user's Home Folder.

See the section called “Thumbnailers” if you want to extend the basic thumbnail functionality provided by Thunar with support for additional file types.

Text beside icons

Select this options to place the icon captions for items in the icon view beside the icon rather than under the icon.

Side Pane Preferences

You can select display options for the shortcuts pane and the tree pane.

The side pane can either display a list of shortcuts for folders in your file system, which is the default, or a tree view of your file system. This page allows you to select the size of the icons for the shortcuts and the tree pane. You can also specify whether emblems should be displayed.

Icon Size

The size of the icons displayed in the side, ranging from Very Small (around 16x16 pixels) to Very Large (around 128x128 pixels).

Show Icon Emblems

Select this option to display emblems for folders in the side pane. You can assign emblems to folders in the Properties dialog. Select a folder in the main area and choose File → Properties... from the main menu, or right-click the folder and select Properties... from the context menu.

Behavior Preferences

You can select the preferred behavior to interact with the file manager.

Single click to active items

Select this option to perform the default action for an item when you click on the item. When this option is selected, and you point to an item, the title of the item is underlined and the item will be selected automatically after a short delay.

This delay can be configured below the option. You can also disable the automatic selection of items by moving the selector to the left-most position.

Double click to activate items

Select this option to perform the default action for an item when you double click on the item, and select the item with a single click.

Advanced Preferences

You can control advanced features of the file manager.

Folder Permissions

Choose the action that should be performed when you change the permissions of a folder in the Properties dialog. You can choose to let Thunar ask everytime when you change folder permissions, tell it to default to applying the new permissions to the folder only or to apply them recursively to the folder contents as well.

Volume Management

If Thunar was installed with support for HAL and the thunar-volman package is also installed, you can enable the integrated volume manager. See the section called “Management of Removable Drives and Media” for details about this feature

Customizing Thunar

This chapter describes how to customize certain parts of the file manager to your own needs.

The "Send To" Menu

Thunar includes a Send To menu, which provides possible targets where files and folders can be sent to. To access the Send To menu, choose File → Send To from the main menu, or right-click on a file or folder and choose Send To.

By default, the Send To menu includes an entry named Desktop (Create Link) for all files and folders, which simply creates a link on the desktop for each selected file. In addition, if the Shortcuts Pane is active, the menu also includes an entry called Side Pane (Create Shortcut) for folders, which allows users to add new shortcuts to the side pane. Following these entries, Thunar lists the removable drives currently plugged into the computer. In the screenshot above, the Floppy Drive represents a possible target where files can be sent to. Note that the device is mounted automatically once selected from the Send To menu, so you do not need to manually mount it.

In addition Thunar also ships the thunar-sendto-email plugin, which adds the entry Mail Recipient to the menu, that opens the mail composer with the selected files attach to the new email. If the selection contains atleast one folder, the selected items are added to a ZIP archive before attaching them to the email. Otherwise, if the selection contains multiple files, or a single file, which is larger than 200Kib, the user will be prompted whether to pack the files into a ZIP archive, and send the ZIP archive.

Like most other features of Thunar, the Send to menu can be easily extended by users and application developers with new targets, using standard desktop entry files. These files must be installed into one of the $XDG_DATA_DIRS/Thunar/sendto/XDG Base Directory Specification for details about the $XDG_DATA_DIRS variable). folders (see the

The MimeType of the target .desktop specifies the types of files for which this action should be available in the Send To menu. For example, say you want to add entry for a Flickr uploader tool, then this entry should only show up if the selection contains JPEG files (other file formats are not supported by Flickr) and so you should add a line MimeType=image/jpeg;. If you do not specify any MimeType your entry will show up for all file types.

A complete example using the postr application is shown below:

# postr.desktop - Integrate postr into
#                 the "Send To" menu.
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
TryExec=postr
Exec=postr %F
Icon=postr
Name=Flickr
MimeType=image/jpeg;

If you install this file to ~/.local/share/Thunar/sendto/ (create the folder if it does not exist yet), the Send To menu for JPEG files will show the new entry Flickr, which can be used to upload JPEG images to Flickr.

The Thunar Project Wiki contains additional examples of useful targets for the Send To menu. Feel free to extend the Wiki page with new examples.

Thumbnailers

Thunar uses small utilities to create thumbnails of certain file types and displays the thumbnails as preview of the file content. These small tools are called thumbnailers. Thunar ships with thumbnailers for image and font files, and makes use of the installed thumbnailers from GNOME automatically if it was installed with support for gconf. Users may however dynamically extend this basic functionality with thumbnailers for additional file types.

If you plan to write a custom thumbnailers, you need to start with a program that accepts atleast two command line parameters, the input file, which is of the file type you plan to support and the output file, which is a PNG file that complies with the format specified by the Thumbnail Management Standard. Additionally your program may also accept the desired size of the thumbnail, which is optional but highly recommended. If you write the output file at an arbitrary image size, Thunar will afterwards scale it to the desired size, which might produce a less optimal result than generating the thumbnail with the requested dimensions.

Once your utility to generate the thumbnails is done, you will need to register your thumbnailer, so Thunar is able to locate and use it. Therefore all you need to do is to install a description file for the thumbnailer (a .desktop file) in one of the $XDG_DATA_DIRS/thumbnailers/ paths. For example, if you want to register the thumbnailer for your user account only, you can install the file into the folder ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/. The .desktop for thumbnailers has the following format.

Thumbnailer Description File Format

Thumbnailer description files utilize the Desktop Entry Format with a special Type of X-Thumbnailer and special field X-Thumbnailer-Exec with new field codes. Basically, a thumbnailer description file has the following format.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=X-Thumbnailer
Name=Your Thumbnailer
MimeType=your-supported/mime-type;
X-Thumbnailer-Exec=your-thumbnailer %i %o %s

The Version and Encoding are mandated by the Desktop Entry Specification, just use the values shown in the example above. The Type field must have the special value X-Thumbnailer, otherwise your thumbnailer will not be recognized. The Name value describes your thumbnailer.

The X-Thumbnailer-Exec field contains the command to run your thumbnailer, and supports certain field codes that will be substituted when the thumbnailer is run. Recognized field codes are as follows:

%i

The local path to the input file for which to create a thumbnail. May be either a path relative to the directory from which the thumbnailer was invoked or an absolute path.

%o

The local path to the output file where to store the generated thumbnail. The output file must be written as valid PNG file according to the thumbnail standard (see above). Note that the path may not end with .png, which matters if you invoke certain third party tools.

%s

The desired size of the generated thumbnail in pixels. This parameter is optional.

%u

Similar to %i, but substituted with the URI of the file, rather than the path. This was added for compatibility with GNOME.

%%

Will be substituted with a single %.

You need to include atleast %o and %i or %u, otherwise your thumbnailer will be useless.

The MimeType lists the MIME types - separated by semicolon - for which your thumbnailer is able to create previews.

Example EPS Thumbnailer

This example demonstrates how to write and install a new thumbnailer for .eps files, which uses the convert utility that ships as part of ImageMagick. First, we start with a simple script that invokes convert to generate a thumbnail at the requested size.

#!/bin/sh
#
# eps-thumbnailer - Example thumbnailer script for EPS files.
#
# Usage: esp-thumbnailer eps-file png-file size
#

# command line parameters
ifile=$1
ofile=$2
size=$3

# invoke convert (ImageMagick)
exec convert "eps:$ifile" -scale "$sizex$size" "png:$ofile"

Save this script above to a file eps-thumbnailer, make sure the file is executable and install it to /usr/local/bin.

$ chmod +x eps-thumbnailer
$ sudo install eps-thumbnailer /usr/local/bin/eps-thumbnailer

Next we need to create the thumbnail description file eps-thumbnailer.desktop, which looks like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=X-Thumbnailer
Name=EPS Thumbnailer
TryExec=convert
MimeType=image/x-eps;
X-Thumbnailer-Exec=/usr/local/bin/eps-thumbnailer %i %o %s

This file must be installed to /usr/local/share/thumbnailers (create the folder if it does not exists).

$ sudo install -d /usr/local/share/thumbnailers

To Bulk Rename Files

To bulk rename files means to rename multiple files at once using some criterion, that applies to atleast one of the files. Thunar includes a bulk renamer, which can be run separately using the command Thunar -B or from within Thunar by selecting two or more files in the main area and pressing F2 or choosing Edit → Rename... from the main menu.

The Bulk Renamers can be applied to the name of the files, the suffix of the files or both to the name and the suffix of the files. Thunar currently supports the following Bulk Renamers:

• Remove characters.

• Numbering files.

• Insert Date or Time.

• Insert or overwrite characters.

• Search and replace characters.

• Convert to uppercase, lowercase or camlcase.

Additional Bulk Renamers may be installed as plugins for Thunar. Check the Thunar Plugins website for currently available extensions. The Thunar Project Wiki contains further details about this feature. Feel free to add more information to the Wiki.

The UNIX File System

While the Thunar file manager does a good job at abstracting the details of the underlying file system, so the user does not need to care about them, it is sometimes useful to understand the basic concepts to get the whole picture. This section tries to give a brief introduction to the concepts of the UNIX file system, which is used today by all incarnations of UNIX, including Linux.

Folders and Paths

In a UNIX file system all folders are arranged in a simple inverted tree structure descending and branching down from a single top level folder, which is called the root directory (the term directory is often used instead of folder) and displayed as File System in Thunar. This means that you can get from any folder to any other by going up the tree until you reach a common point, then down the tree through the appropriate subfolders until you reach your target.

The position of any file or folder in the tree can be described by its path. The path is the list of folders you would have to descend through to get to the target folder or file, starting from the top level folder. For example /home/luke is the subfolder luke of the subfolder home of the top level folder, and /home/luke/myfile.txt is the file myfile.txt in that subfolder. The leading / in these paths represents the top level folder.

Every user has their own folder to hold their personal files and settings. This folder is called the home directory and is displayed in Thunar as special icon with the users login name. The folder is similar to the My Files folder known from Windows. The home directories of the various users in a system are usually located below the /home folder. For example /home/luke would be the home directory of the user with the login name luke, while /home/jane would be the home directory for the user with the login name jane.

File Types

You may have already heard that everything is a file in UNIX. This is true for most objects present in UNIX systems today. In fact even devices are represented as a special files. While this may not make sense at first sight, it is one of the strengths of UNIX and its derivates, and has helped it to maintain a simple core over the years where other operating systems had to introduce new concepts for every new technology.

These are the four most important types of files in the UNIX file system.

Ordinary Files

An ordinary file may contain text, a program or other data. This includes image files, audio files, office documents and video files. The term file is often used to refer to an ordinary file.

Folder Files

Folders are also files in the UNIX file system. To be exact a folder is a special file, which contains a mapping of file names to file references for every file contained within this folder.

Symbolic Link Files

A Symbolic link (often called a symlink) is a special file that contains a path to another file in the file system. Symbolic link files therefore do not contain any useful information themselves, but just refer to other files.

Device Files

As mentioned earlier (most) devices are also accessed through the file system. These special device files are usually located in the /dev folder. For example the special file /dev/hda represents the first IDE disk on Linux.

---

$ sudo install eps-thumbnailer.desktop /usr/local/share/thumbnailers/eps-thumbnailer.desktop

The eps-thumbnailer.desktop file uses the special key TryExec, which, if specified, names a command that must be present on the system for the thumbnailer to be useful. In this case, our script is useless if the convert utility is not present.

The last step is to regenerate the thumbnailer cache, so Thunar will pick up our thumbnailer. The thumbnailer cache is located at $XDG_CACHE_HOME/Thunar/thumbnailers.cache (unless overridden by your or your system administrator, the $XDG_CACHE_HOME points to the folder ~/.cache/). The thumbnailers cache is regenerated periodically by Thunar, but you can force to regenerate it by invoking the thunar-vfs-update-thumbnailers-cache-1 utility, that ships as part of Thunar. This utility is usually installed in the libexec subfolder of your installation prefix (sbin on Debian/Ubuntu). So for example, if Thunar is installed in /usr, invoke the utility as follows:

$ /usr/libexec/thunar-vfs-update-thumbnailers-cache-1

But make sure you run the program from your user account, not the superuser account, since the thumbnailers cache is stored in your home folder, rather than a system wide location.

Now, if Thunar is compiled with support for file alteration monitoring (using the FAM or Gamin services), it will automatically pick up the new thumbnailers cache within a few seconds and afterwards be able to generate thumbnails using your custom thumbnailers. Otherwise you might need to completely restart Thunar to apply the changes, using

$ Thunar -q

to terminate any running instance, and afterwards restart it from your launcher.

Cleaning up Thumbnails

The generated thumbnails are stored in the folder ~/.thumbnails/ complying with the Thumbnail Management Standard. While testing a new thumbnailer, it might help to clean up the thumbnail cache using

$ rm -rf ~/.thumbnails/

which will also give you some free space in your home folder. Since all the information stored within this folder was automatically generated from files in your file system, you will not loose any sensitive data.

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