Thunar

zh-CN:Thunar Template:Article summary start Template:Article summary text Template:Article summary heading Template:Article summary wiki: Thunar is installed with a nominal installation of xfce4. Template:Article summary text. Template:Article summary end

Thunar is a file manager that is designed to be fast, lightweight, and easy-to-use. A standard installation of xfce4 will contain Thunar, but it can be used with other standalone window managers.

Installation

Install the thunar package which is available in the official repositories.

If you are running Xfce4, you probably already have Thunar installed.

Automounting

Thunar uses gvfs for automounting, see GVFS for details on getting it working.

Thunar Volume Manager

While Thunar can support automatic mounting and unmounting of removable media, the Thunar Volume Manager allows extended functionality, such as automatically running commands or automatically opening a Thunar window for mounted media.

Installation

Thunar Volume Manager can be installed from the package thunar-volman 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:

1. Launch Thunar and go to Edit -> Preferences
2. Under the 'Advanced' tab, check 'Enable Volume Management'
3. Click configure and check the following items:
   • Mount removable drives when hot-plugged.
   • Mount removable media when inserted.
4. Also make desired changes (see the example below)

Here's an example setting for making Amarok play an audio CD.

 Multimedia - Audio CDs: amarok --cdplay %d

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, similar to the functionality found in GNOME and KDE. The gvfs and gvfs-smb packages are required to enable this functionality. Both packages are available in the official repositories.

After a restart of Xfce an additional "Network" entry is added to Thunar's side bar and remote locations can be opened by using the following URI schemes in the location dialog (opened with Template:Keypress): smb://, ftp://, ssh://

Starting in Daemon Mode

Thunar may be run in daemon mode. This has several advantages, including a faster startup for Thunar, as well as Thunar running in the background and only opening a window when necessary (for instance, when a flash drive is inserted).

One option is to autostart it using .xinitrc or an autostart script (such as Openbox's autostart). It is up to you to decide the best way to start it, and this option can be run from a script or run directly as a command in the terminal.

To run Thunar in daemon mode, simply add to your autostart script or run from the terminal:

$ thunar --daemon &

Setting the Icon Theme

When using Thunar outside of Gnome or Xfce, certain packages and configurations that control which icons are used may be missing. Window Managers like Awesome and Xmonad do not come with XSettings managers, which is where Thunar looks first for it's icon setting. It is possible to install and run xfce-mcs-manager from a startup script if many Xfce4 and Gnome applications are going to be used. The gtk-icon-theme-name setting for gtk2 can be set for a user by adding something like the following to ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

 gtk-icon-theme-name = "Tango"

Of course, just installing the gnome-icon-theme package will give Thunar an icon theme to use other than the default paper icon for all items.

# pacman -S gnome-icon-theme

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 /usr/share/gvfs/mounts/network.mount and change AutoMount=true to AutoMount=false.

Other plugins and addons

Many of these plugins belong to the xfce4-goodies group. If you've installed the group, you probably have these plugins already.

Thunar Archive Plugin

The Thunar Archive Plugin 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, Ark, or Xarchiver. It is available through the thunar-archive-plugin package in the official repositories.

Thunar Media Tags Plugin

The Media Tags Plugin allows you to view detailed information about media files. It also has a bulk renamed and allows editing of media tags. It supports ID3 (the MP3 file format's system) and Ogg/Vorbis tags. It is available through the thunar-media-tags-plugin package.

Thunar thumbnails

Thunar relies on an external program called tumbler to generate thumbnails. It is available through the tumbler package.

To generate video thumbnails, you also need to install ffmpegthumbnailer.

Thunar Shares

The Thunar Shares Plugin allows you to quickly share a folder using Samba from Thunar without requiring root access. It is available through the thunar-shares-plugin^AUR package in the AUR.

See Samba#Creating user share path for configuration directions.

Custom actions

This section covers useful custom actions which can be accessed through Edit -> Configure custom actions. More examples are listed in the thunar wiki.

Scan for viruses

To use this action you need to have clamav and clamtk installed.

Name	Command	File patterns	Appears if selection contains
Scan for virus	clamtk %F	*	Select all

Link to Dropbox

Name	Command	File patterns	Appears if selection contains
Link to Dropbox	ln -s %f /path/to/DropboxFolder	*	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 ~/.local/share/Thunar/sendto for each action to perform. Say we want to put the above dropbox symlink action into Send To, we create a dropbox_folder.desktop with the following content. The new applied action will be active after restarting Thunar.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec=ln -s %f /path/to/DropboxFolder
Icon=/usr/share/icons/dropbox.png
Name=Dropbox

Links and References

• Thunar project page.
• Thunar Volume Manager project page.
• Thunar Archive Plugin project page.
• Thunar Media Tags Plugin project page.
• Thunar Shares Plugin project page.
• This list of plugins.