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# Thunar

From ArchWiki

Summary
This article discusses every aspect of the file manager named Thunar.
Related
Xfce: Thunar is installed with a nominal installation of xfce4.
Nautilus: Thunar is not the only file manager. There are many. For example, Nautilus is the file manager for gnome.

From the project home page:

  Thunar is a new 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 which is available in the official repositories. It is part of the xfce4 group, so 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.

### Plugins and addons

- 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 (kdeutils-ark) or Xarchiver (xarchiver). Part of xfce4-goodies.

  http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/thunar-plugins/thunar-archive-plugin || thunar-archive-plugin

- Thunar Media Tags Plugin — Plugin which 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. Part of xfce4-goodies.

  http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/thunar-plugins/thunar-media-tags-plugin || thunar-media-tags-plugin

- Thunar Shares Plugin — Plugin which allows you to quickly share a folder using Samba from Thunar without requiring root access. See also how to configure directions.

  http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/thunar-plugins/thunar-shares-plugin || thunar-shares-plugin

- Thunar Volume Manager — Automatic management of removeable devices in Thunar. Part of xfce4.

  http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/thunar-plugins/thunar-volman || thunar-volman

- Tumbler — External program to generate thumbnails. Also install ffmpegthumbnailer to enable video thumbnailing.

  http://git.xfce.org/xfce/tumbler/tree/README || tumbler

## 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, gvfs-smb and sshfs packages are required to enable this functionality. These 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 `Ctrl+l`): smb://, ftp://, ssh://, sftp://

### GVFS needs D-Bus and polkit

If you use a standalone window manager, make sure D-Bus is launched on login, and you are running a polkit authentication agent. Otherwise GVFS will not be active. See General Troubleshooting#Session permissions for details.

### 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).

Make sure the command `thunar --daemon` is autostarted on login.

### 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.

### 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.

## 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

## See also

- Thunar project page
- Thunar Volume Manager project page
- This list of plugins

Retrieved from "https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Thunar&oldid=277170"
Category:

- File managers

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