# Thunar File Manager

&date;
2004
2005
2006
Benedikt Meurer

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. The complete license text is available from the Free Software Foundation.

Benedikt
Meurer

    benny@xfce.org

os-cillation
System development
Software developer
This manual describes version &version; of &application;.

## Introduction to &application;

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.

The Thunar file manager thereby provides an integrated access point to your files and applications. You can use the file manager to do the following:

- Create folders and documents.
- Display your files and folders.
- Manage your files and folders.
- Run and manage custom actions.
- Access Removable Media.

## Advanced Topics

### 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.

## Frequently Asked Questions

The intent of this section is to collect the quite numerous frequently asked questions that relate to working with Thunar. If you know of a question that is missing from this page, please file a request.

### Why doesn't Thunar execute files marked as executable?

For security reasons Thunar only executes files of type `application/x-desktop`, `application/x-executable` and `application/x-shellscript`. For desktop files the execution feature will only be enabled if the desktop file is of type `Application` and a valid `Exec` line is given or of type `Link` and a valid `URL` is given. For the other types the feature is available if the file is marked executable for the current user.

Also note that for `application/x-executable` and `application/x-shellscript`, the types of the file don't really need to match these types exactly, but it is suffice if the detected type has a parent that matches one of the two types listed above, or if the MIME-type is an alias for one of the above.

### Where does Thunar store the metadata associated with files?

Thunar associates various settings with files/folders, which we call metadata. This metadata for all files is stored in tdb database file, which is called the metafile. The database file is stored in `$XDG_CACHE_HOME/Thunar/metafile.tdb` and can be examined using the `tdbtool`, which is part of the Thunar distribution (located in the `tdb/` subdirectory).

### Where does Thunar store its preferences?

Thunar stores the user configurable preferences (and hidden settings) in an `.ini` file, which is located at `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Thunar/thunarrc` and can be examined using a text editor. See `docs/README.thunarrc` for an overview of the various preferences.

### How to use mouse gestures in Thunar?

Thunar currently features basic support for so called mouse gestures in its icon view. You can use these mouse gestures by holding down the middle mouse button (usually the mouse wheel) while the mouse pointer is on the background area of the icon view component (any area that is not covered by an icon or a text). Now you can move the cursor into four directions to perform certain actions, which are described below.

- Left - opens the previous visited folder
- Up - opens the parent folder
- Right - opens the next visited folder
- Down - reloads the current folder

### How do I assign different keyboard shortcuts?

If you want to rebind a shortcut, Thunar supports the standard GTK+ way of changing shortcuts: simply hover over the menu option with the mouse pointer and press the keyboard shortcut you want to rebind it to.

To delete a keyboard assignment, press the Backspace key while you are on the menu entry.

If the shortcut doesn't change, then you need to enable the feature in GTK+. This can be achieved in 3 ways:

- If you are running Xfce 4.3 or above then you can enable Editable menu accelerators in the User Interface Preferences dialog.

- If you are running GNOME then you can enable Editable menu accelerators in the Menu and Toolbars control center dialog.

- Otherwise put the following in your `~/.gtkrc-2.0` file (create the file if it doesn't exist):

      gtk-can-change-accels=1

### Where does Thunar store the keyboard shortcuts?

The custom keyboard shortcuts are stored in the standard GTK+ accel map format in a file located at `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Thunar/accels.scm`. Lines starting with `;` are comments. See the GTK+ documentation for details about the file format.

If you are a packager or a system administrator and want to provide a system wide default for the keyboard shortcuts, that is different from the default shortcuts in Thunar, you can create a file `Thunar/accels.scm` in one of the `$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS`. For example, if `/etc/xdg` is part of `$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS` (the default for most Linux distributions), you can install system wide defaults to `/etc/xdg/Thunar/accels.scm`. Thunar will then load shortcuts from this file on first startup.

## Support

To report a bug or to make a suggestion regarding this application or this manual, use the bug tracking system at http://bugzilla.xfce.org/. Remember that useful bug reports are ones that get bugs fixed, so a useful bug report has two qualities:

- Reproducible. If the developer cannot see the bug himself to prove that it exists, he will most probably not be able to fix it at all. Every detail you can provide helps.

- Specific. The quicker the developer can isolate the problem to a specific area, the more likely he will expediently fix it.

In case you want to request a new feature, please make clear why you consider it a worth addition for the application. It is more likely that a new feature gets added if you provide good arguments for the feature. It will increase the chance of addition even more if you provide a patch that implements the requested feature, but make sure that you read the file HACKING - especially the section labeled Coding Style - before you start hacking up the source.

Else, if you have questions about the use or installation of this software, please ask on the thunar-dev mailing list or point your IRC client to irc.freenode.net, join the channel #thunar and ask for help.

## About &application;

&application; was written by Benedikt Meurer (benny@xfce.org). Visit the Thunar website for more information.

This documentation was written by Benedikt Meurer (benny@xfce.org). The latest version of this document is always available from the Thunar website.

This software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.