Thunar: My New Favorite?

[@TheLinuxCast]

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[@domportera]

honestly i think file managers are an under rated part of all desktops, linux or not. aside from the web browser, it's probably the most common application you interact with on your PC

[@muffina672]

Depends on the user. For example I'm rarely using a file manager as It's just quicker to use terminal

[@chloe-sunshine7]

​@@muffina672I tend to try to use the terminal, and then I run into a knowledge wall. There are some times when I have to copy a list of specific files from one folder to another, and I find it easier to just select, and drag and drop.

[@kelvinpina8815]

Cat, mv rm, less, open. All your need

[@muffina672]

@@chloe-sunshine7 just do mv path/to/file path/to/another_file ... path/to/destination. Basically last path is the destination, same should apply to commands like cp but im not sure

[@MaxUgly]

​@@kelvinpina8815what about touch, vi or nano, and the only way I move or copy rsync (preferably with rsyncy, for better, more useful, verbosity) oh yea, grep, mount, etc....?

[@ToroNero]

Thunar is my all time favorite. It's the second thing I install on a new system, after gparted. Even though I don't use XFCE for a long time I still use Thunar. Thanks for the video.

[@har168421]

Thunar custom actions functionality is great. On XFCE they show up on the desktop right click menu. One of the reasons XFCE is my favorite DE. I got a lot of ideas from Arcolinux.

[@PranjayVarshney]

Yeah that custom action feature is one of my favorite things about xfce

[@tambuchalinux]

Agreed that Xfce rocks. But the Dev's really should consider levelling up the default layout for it..and also make the whisker menu installed by default.

[@benjy288]

Many file managers have custom action support, they just don't have a gui option to create one.

[@patpopov]

You can make the image preview bigger by dragging the side panel. Also you can have the image preview on the right by going to Edit > Preferences > Side Pane and changing Image Preview Mode from Embedded to Standalone. You're welcome.

[@northwanderer800]

your OCD for these things is the reason i love this channel so much.. plus how you guys just do general chat about how you are using your systems week to week .. its just so good and i find so many cool things to try

[@santonopoulou]

Oh! Enjoy!! I use Thunar for a very long time now

[@chrispop99]

The ability to configure the context menu is indeed very useful. MX Linux makes use of this by including things like right-clicking an ISO gives the ability to compute sha/md5sum.

[@russellrussell5495]

Love MX. I run MX Xfce with i3 WM. There's an idiot-proof guide about installing and running i3-gaps on the forum which works a treat!

[@zenmaster24]

Nemo is fine and you can add actions which run scripts from the context menu - i run 2 scripts that sort files in to directories based on dates, and another to download a video given an m3u playlist and they work fine

[@BG101UK]

Good to see Thunar being improved. I have a few old machines with Xfce on them which might see another revival when I get round to it & it'd be nice to have a decent file manager as default. Having used Dolphin for years, I tend to find other FMs a bit lacking in some ways.

[@kooostia16]

Nice pfp

[@Bruces-Eclectic-World]

Since I switched 3 of my computers to Xfce I have been happy. Thunar has surprised me also. I'm a Nemo fan and my latest issues with Cinnamon I find my self happy with thunar and the ease to add the action menu is awesome to me. Now if they would only add the double click action on a file name to edit the file name with out hitting F2, I would happy as a hog in mud! 🤣 Will I go back to Cinnamon? Can't say... Right now it is Xfce... For a sec. You had me thinking you were going into a Foss or FSF rant... 🤪 LLAP 🖖

[@soppaism]

Nice. IIRC, the dual pane issue was the main reason that stopped me from using Thunar as well. I've forgotten what the other problems were though, so I think I'll just continue using SpaceFM :)

[@wyfyj]

Thunar and Ranger are my go to's. Was thinking about Nemo. But I am just used to Thunar

[@radscot]

Hi Folks. I just tried installing Thunar on Linux Mint (Cinnamon) and from their repositories you get version 4.16.10 and it doesn't have the 'remember open tabs' option, however, having just looked at the default LM file manager (Nemo), I was pleasantly surprised to find that there is an option to 'always open in dual tab mode'. Sadly, it doesn't recall where you'd previously navigated to (but as you also suggested, simply leaving it open on another workspace would be a close second to that) so it was still a mighty fine discovery. I'd never even have thought of looking for that feature had it not been for watching your video, so thank you for the inspiration(s)!🙂 🙂 🙂

[@Maxume]

Thunar is my favourite file manager by country mile. The only thing I really hope they fix, is the right-click-drag while in details view. I'm on an LTS distro though, so maybe it's fixed already in a newer version and I just don't have access to it yet.

[@davidpotter3717]

I also think Thunar is a great file manager. It is fast and does everything you need from a file manager. This might be controversial, but I also like Midnight Commander. It is lightweight, dual pane, and you can use the keyboard to navigate. It does however take a bit of effort to master. There is a very good introduction to it on the video titled "My FAVORITE File Manager - Complete Midnight Commander Tutorial" by Tech Craft.

[@squillium7149]

Great video as always. I’ve been enjoying thunar for a while now. Also, I noticed your icons in your group box aren’t perfectly aligned, I struggled to figure out how to get my icons in the group box centered in Qtile, but I found that if you add “Mono” the the end of the font it forces icons to be one character in size. For example instead of: “Mononoki Nerd Font” you can use “Mononoki Nerd Font Mono”. This fixed the issue with centering the icons. This does make the icons smaller, so I had to increase the font to large size. I hope this can help others that are struggling to center the icons since i couldn’t find any answers on the internet on how to center the icons in an easy way

[@TheLinuxCast]

I have mono at the end. I use JetBrains Mono Nerd Font Mono

[@jeffrodrequez]

Since I have pretty much switched to running Arch with Hyprland as my daily for the last 5 months, I have been using Thunar primarily and I agree with everything you said. The only thing that I had to add that I needed was a better search. I downloaded the gnome-search-tool then added that as one of the custom options (command: gnome-search-tool --path=%f --contains=). Allows me to right click on any folder and do search.

[@folksurvival]

Thunar is good. Caja is also very underrated.

[@BytebroUK]

Hah! The entire ethos when they were building the base Unix utils was "have each thing do just one thing, do it well, and take input from another thing if needed, and pipe output to another thing if necessary". 'Do one thing and do it well' is exactly why I'm still using vi, (or actually gvim)!

[@MENTOKz]

that thunar demon is to make it instant fast gotta love it also great video Matt

[@mylinuxforwork]

Thanks for the video. Thunar is my favorite file manager too. Fast, easy and customizable. Best for window manager users. Plus randr 😂

[@Linuxdirk]

I always love others explaining their setup. I am the complete opposite when it comes to file managing. I am a long-term ROX-Filer user. It’s basically a GUI to interact with the file system directly :) No meta data, no fancy-ness, just a list of files and directories.

[@eriklundstedt9469]

I'd want a terminal filemanager with a GUI part for preview and maybe like file listing (in which case it would not be a terminal filemanager but you would use the Unix commands to move around and have a gui that does the equivalent of running ls in each opened directory) This would be like the konsole pane in dolphin but the other way around, a filemanager part in the terminal instead of a terminal in the filemanager

[@besnikrrustemi]

Add a Spacer widget after your weather widget and before your temp widget to make it look better so the open window widget on the bar doesn't almost touch the font of the weather widget and temp widget.

[@LillyAnarkitty]

The #1 thing I want from a file manager is to be able to fully customize the bookmarks/shortcuts pane. Why most FOSS file managers mandate that I have the standard home directories bookmarked in the standard order is beyond me. And they force them into predetermined groups for no apparent reason. All I want is to have my root directory at the top, then my home directory, desktop, and downloads. Turns out that is not allowed. Literal Microsoft File Explorer has a more customizable side bar than most Linux file managers.

[@hipdad9461]

Welcome to the THUNAR!!!

[@Jeff--vq4zb]

The last time I used Thunar I remember that I couldn't use multi-select. I could drag and select a lot of files at once, but then I couldn't hold shift, then select a new group of files. I currently use Kubuntu, and I see that Xubuntu has a minimal version with bare menus. That's a good idea. Maybe XFCE and Thunar is not so bad.

[@ArniesTech]

What I miss in Thunar is the KDE-Dolphin-esque or Windows-esque renaming by clicking on the item twice. 🙏

[@Jeff--vq4zb]

If there's a rename function near the title bar that I can just click with the mouse, that's good enough for me.

[@zurkke]

F2

[@TrustJesusToday]

Nemo has an dual pane start option.

[@luvinlinux7760]

Thunar saved me. I did something (click, drag, oh dear, where is my stuff) in dolphin and lost an important files in the folder. it was visible but not accessible with dolphin. With Thunar I was able to correct permissions and recover access. Love the cast Matt, keep up the great content.

[@schwingedeshaehers]

use the terminal

[@dubbeltumme]

@TheLinuxCast a lot of the features that you "need" you already had. What is dual-pane if not just a tiled window? Tiling window managers does this better than any application, just open two windows (or more) filemanager windows. Tabs is something not all windowmanagers do, but suckless has a tabbed program, that supposedly can tab any windows. i3 has it built in, and awesome has the ability. Thunar is excellent for this workflowsince it can be run in daemon mode, doing this make it very cheap to open multiple windows. The cool thing with this is that your panes now has the same superpowers as any window, so your window manager keybindings work for resize and move of the "panes". Another tip related to thunar storing the views now, is that this apply to icon-size, sorting and list type as well, so if you set your wallpaper directory to be iconview f.i. it will remember that.

[@TheLinuxCast]

having two instances open is much more inefficient.

[@mgkallits]

How did you make qtile work, I had some problems with it because pip did work, I'd love to see how you setup a minimal installation and what apps you use, the theming -which is is amazing- and all that. I am a new on linux so I don't really know how all that works but with a couple of months i am trying to change from macos it is really overwhelming because of all the thinks that are possible with linux and how many way there are to configure all of your stuff. Great video and thanks for all the dedicated work you do, a a newbie they help me a lot. Also I am studying mathematic and going on the path of becoming a data scientist so I'm gonna be programming a lot on the following years as learning goes..

[@Schwarzer.Kater.YouTube]

Thunar 4.18 is the best GTK file manager now - better than Nemo and all the rest. But it still is in a lower league than Konqueror or Dolphin.

[@LowSpecLinuxLaptop]

Elegant Simplicity

[@ekrajb]

I was trying to get the photos from my android phone over to my computer. Thunar did not see my phone so I watched this video by Matt about Thunar instead. I discover that my Thunar can not use gvfs. So I install gvfs-backends and now I can see my phone in Thunar and transfer my photos.

[@arnaudtisset]

I was coming to say the same, It is a deterrent for me not being able to connect to things right away, I understand not everyone as a need to connect to their phone, or even a NAS or whatever file sharing solution but that's more common than before. gvfs is so far the best for me too and works ok with Thunar.

[@gambinante]

I like MC (Midnight commander) but Thunar is great as an alternative to a lightweihgt file manager. Midnight Commander is an overlooked file manager IMHO.

[@brainstormsurge154]

Seeing as Dolphin is now the default KDE file manager that succeeded Krusader would like to know your thoughts on comparing the two.

[@zerotheory941]

Yeah Thunar and Ranger are my goto... 3rd backup is Nautilus.

[@russellrussell5495]

Good to know. I won't be switching from Double Commander, though.

[@TheLinuxCast]

If double commander was GTK3 I'd probably use that too. And I really don't want to use the QT one as explained in the video.

[@oalfodr]

I am missing the point why split panes file managers are used by tiling wm users. I just open two file manager windows side by side. Also why the need to keep them opened? I get that you use them often but opening the fm takes one shortcut and moving to desired bookmark takes just one other. Same as if you needed to focus opened window (even more if it is not in current workspace) and another to move focus to the pane you want

[@ellenorbjornsdottir1166]

tracker music intro!!!!

[@roo79x]

As far as I'm aware Krusader like Dolphin has the Viewer Panel. I don't know if you enable it the same way as you do in Dolphin. I am a Plasma fan. BUT!. XFCE and Thunar are still my solid number 2. Thunar's bulk rename tool works so much easier and better for me than krename and others.

[@chaslinux]

Thumbs up...

[@kennywest831]

Have you tried pcmanfm ? It's a good "does what we need but nothing else" file manager. I switched to it from Thunar and like it better. My 2 cents, anyway.

[@darylnd]

"Approximately five."

[@dianaalyssa8726]

I've used a lot of Thunar (and Dolphin). Feels second nature to me.

[@jodschin]

Sunflower is a FM that nobody talks about. It has more or less the some features.

[@TheLinuxCast]

I can never get that to build. I may give it another go

[@NatePick]

Ok, I am gonna have to add this...

[@ent2220]

I only use Thunar. Dolphin and Nautilus are both bloated. Not to mention in Dolphin you can't even stop it from analyzing the folders in a directories - how many items each has or space it takes, which if you have a a lot of files, it significantly reduces performance, and it also unnecessarily bothers your HDD/SSD with something so pointless.

[@tambuchalinux]

Thunar and Pcmanfm are the only 2 that I use regularly. They do what I need, and that's what I need..the other stuff are just unnecessary "features"

[@tripcurrent3197]

Kinda strange that out of many file managers only Thunar, Dolphin and Nemo have an easy option to remember display style for each folder, and Nautilus used to have it in the past. Idk maybe this feature became unpopular or hard to maintain, but are there any other file managers that can do that without tinkering?

[@TheLinuxCast]

Krusader, Double Commander and SpaceFM all do.

[@kychemclass5850]

A good(powerful) file manager is certainly essential. But it's worrying we faff around with files so much :s

[@benjy288]

Thunar is good, but there's a few things that bugged me, one is when you configure it to open desktop files in a text editor it will ignore that and just execute it, the other is sometimes when you go into a directory and then go back to the original directory the spacing between folders will be bigger, so I've switched to spacefm instead, spacefm is highly configurable, probably more so than any other gui file manager, the only issues is its not maintained anymore, so there's a few bugs, like if I right click on the status bar it will crash, not that that's something I need to do, the other thing is it doesn't have an option to remember view modes for different folders, but it does have the option to save tabs, plus you can do other cool things like add application shortcuts to the toolbar, I wish someone would adopt it and continue to maintain it.

[@benjy288]

In response spacefm has too many bugs, its crashed multiple times now, which is a shame because its very unique, its too bad its been abandoned, so I've gone to pcmanfm, which has custom action support too, and at least asks you if you want to open a .desktop file or execute it, unlike thunar which will just execute it even though you've set it to open in a text editor.

[@allsunday1485]

you literally hovered over the image preview panel while saying you can't resize it. Just make the side pane wider.

[@TheLinuxCast]

yeah, didn't think to make that bigger, I was trying to drag up

[@allsunday1485]

@@TheLinuxCast makes sense tho. Doing stuff while talking is hard af

[@TheLinuxCast]

@@allsunday1485 agreed.

[@mrbc2004]

Can you please share the Qtile dotfiles?

[@chloe-sunshine7]

Is spacefm not dead and broken anymore? I loved that file manager, and I only stopped using it because it would constantly crash, and then I read that it was no longer being developed, and something broke after that somehow.

[@soppaism]

I use v1.0.6, and it has some issues. For example, repeatedly copy&pasting paths to the "path bar" makes it go crazy after a few rounds. But I use it anyway, since I rarely need that feature (or the other features it has problems with).

[@klp8136]

can you PLEASE tell me how you made it so it highlights the folder or file you hover over, i have searched everywhere and not even found a single person with this problem (it just not highlighting anything)

[@zoltan1953]

The only reason I don't use Thunar is because, as far as I know, it won't open in dual pane mode automatically if you don't tell it to remember your last position/open tabs. I typically don't care to have my file manager remember my last position, I prefer to start from home and manually work my way out from there. Nemo, on the other hand, has a specific setting to make it always open in dual pane mode. However, it won't remember your last position, which kinda kills its candidacy for you.

[@chrispop99]

MX Linux has added the ability to choose dual pane mode as the default on opening. You can turn it on from the Tweak menu.

[@Winnetou17]

Hey Matt! Pardon my ramble, but having another favorite any other week is ... not good. I mean, it all boils down to not being useful. What I mean is that for, I guess most people, or, at worst, me, favorite is a pretty strong term. A strong bond. Having something as a favorite means that you still like it even at its worst, it was with you in face of adversity, it helped you stay on your feet when the earthquake came, things like that. If it's something that you're just trying and you like it, I don't think it's enough to call it favorite. It's just too soon. There's too weak of a bond. I mean, that can be created very quickly, but usually that means that it's MILES BETTER than everything you've tried before, if it instantly (or just very quickly) becomes your favorite. I'm sorry if this is a bit negative. But I'm trying to be constructive. If I see someone keep changing its favorites, I personally very quickly lose interest.

[@TheLinuxCast]

I used Krusader for 2 years. I think that's a good long run.

[@scottb4029]

How about pcmanfm?

[@TheLinuxCast]

I've tried it in the past. It doesn't remember position, and it has this odd highlighting of which pane is the active one that can't be turned off.

[@younesjaafar2216]

Lacks some basic functions in copy past

[@dragos-andreirotaru2316]

Ranger is my way to go

[@alphabennyrosy5068]

What is ur gtk that you used in thunar, if you don't mind sharing.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Material

[@alexsturm1799]

… and you like Neovim A LOT 😊

[@TheLinuxCast]

Truth.

[@JoseMartinez-iq3xq]

In my case the best for me is Polo, krusader, dolphin and pcmanfm in that order and for terminal mc and ranger.

[@TheLinuxCast]

I couldn't get polo to build, it's about the only one I haven't been able to try. May try it on my EndeavourOS VM

[@JoseMartinez-iq3xq]

@@TheLinuxCast The final version is not out yet, they are in pre-release 18.8 (I think), it lacks a file finder and adjust some details such as the creation of qemu volumes and other little things. I don't know if you have seen SpaceFM File Manager. Sorry for my English, my friend deepl helps me to communicate.

[@adrmantap6508]

I try to use spacefm right now, 😅,

[@TheLinuxCast]

Has potential but it's abandoned 😭

[@gimcrack555]

I like spacefm. It's a old and abandoned project. But it does work with no problems. It's open source. So if you need or want to tweak it. Well you can. Don't need it to be an active project.

[@TheLinuxCast]

@@gimcrack555 I liked it too, but in some versions it has this drag and drop bug where it crashes when you drag something outside of it. Not always. But I do like it. Having more than two panels is really cool

[@gimcrack555]

@@TheLinuxCast That crash bug. You looked into it? Like your logs to pinpoint that causes the crash. Didn't ran in that problem.

[@christopherexline6247]

Since when does Thinar have a dual pane view? It does not appear to be available on Linux Mint 21.1 XFCE edition. Anybody know how to get split pane functionality?

[@TheLinuxCast]

Mint still uses the last LTS which was well over a year ago. I think that dual pane got added with xfce 4.18 or maybe 4.17.

[@christopherexline6247]

Updated Mint to 21.2 and that took care of it!

[@rhwinner]

Crazy, but I've never felt the need for a graphical file browser.

[@anthonyprime202]

"Dont install linux on moms laptop" have me dying 😂🤣

[@Daonexus]

my favorite part of this video is don't install Linux on moms laptop

[@michaelandrews4783]

Christ Linux is still a waste of time tinker fest as a desktop........ great for servers.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Probably someone who never actually used Linux.