Thunar Plugins
The Thunar File Manager was designed to be extensible through plugins in
various ways (through the thunarx extension framework).
- Advanced Properties Plugin (thunar-apr)
- Archive Plugin (thunar-archive-plugin)
- Media Tags Plugin (thunar-media-tags-plugin)
- Simple Builtin Renamers (thunar-sbr)
- Additional Thumbnailers (thunar-thumbnailers)
- User Customizable Actions (thunar-uca)
Advanced Properties Plugin (thunar-apr)
This plugin ships as part of the Thunar distribution in the plugins/thunar-apr/ subdirectory. It currently
provides two additional pages for the file properties dialog, the Image page which displays advanced properties
of image files (including Exif metainformation if Thunar was built with support for
libexif), and the Launcher/Link page which provides a simple
editor for .desktop files.
The screenshot above shows the Launcher page in action, editing the Thunar.desktop file.
Archive Plugin (thunar-archive-plugin)
This plugin allows users to create and extract archive files using the file context menus of the file manager. It includes a generic archive manager interface, and can thereby be extended to work with virtually every archive manager out there. It ships with support for File Roller (the GNOME archive manager) and Ark (the KDE archive manager). Xarchiver (the Xfce archive manager) will add support for the new plugin in the next release.
Visit the thunar-archive-plugin website for download locations and installation instructions.
Media Tags Plugin (thunar-media-tags-plugin)
Written by Jannis Pohlmann, this plugin provides a tag
based renamer, as shown on the screenshot below, which allows users to rename multiple media files
at once using the tags (i.e. ID3 tags in case of mp3 files) stored in the files,
and an additional page for the file properties dialog of audio files, which enables users to
edit media tags (i.e. ID3 tags) from within Thunars file properties dialog.
Visit the thunar-media-tags-plugin project page for download locations and installation instructions.
Simple Builtin Renamers (thunar-sbr)
This plugin ships as part of the Thunar distribution in the plugins/thunar-sbr/
subdirectory. It provides a bunch of simple renamer modules for the Bulk Rename
functionality of Thunar:
- Insert / Overwrite
- Numbering
- Remove Characters
- Search & Replace
- Uppercase / Lowercase
The builtin renamers provide only basic renaming functionality. More sophisticated renamers can be written as additional modules for Thunar (see the Thunar Extension Framework Reference Manual for details). The Media Tags Plugin is an example of such a plugin.
Additional Thumbnailers (thunar-thumbnailers)
Thunar uses external utilities - so called thumbnailers - to generate previews of certain files. Thunar ships with thumbnailers to generate previews of image and font files and can automatically use available GNOME thumbnailers if it was build with support for gconf.
However, even then, there are several file types for which no thumbnailer exists. The thunar-thumbnailers project, maintained by Erlend Davidson aims to provide additional thumbnailers for Thunar, that also cover less common file formats.
User Customizable Actions (thunar-uca)
This plugin also ships as part of the Thunar distribution in the plugins/thunar-uca/
subdirectory. It allows users to extend the context menus of the file manager (and xfdesktop)
with custom actions that run external programs.
The user can edit this actions in the Custom Actions dialog shown in the screenshot above, which is available from the Edit menu as Configure custom actions... in every Thunar window.