Frequently Asked Questions

This page contains a list of frequently asked questions about Thunar and the appropriate answeres to these questions.

Thunar is a fast and easy-to-use file manager for the X Window System, with a special focus on the Xfce Desktop Environment.

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. 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.

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).

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.

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 - reload the current folder

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

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 (most likely 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.

If Thunar displays the fallback icon for all files and folders, as shown in the screenshot below, it is usually caused by one of the following problems:

1. You don’t have an XSETTINGS manager running,
2. or the selected icon theme does not follow the GNOME naming scheme for MIME icons or it does not contain any MIME icons at all.

The first problem can be fixed by running an XSETTINGS manager in your desktop session, for example xfce-mcs-manager or gnome-settings-daemon. Modern desktop environments automatically spawn a settings manager on startup, so you shouldn’t experience this problem in Xfce or GNOME. If you don’t want to run an XSETTINGS manager, you can also specify an icon theme in your ~/.gtkrc-2.0. For example to use the Tango icon theme add a line

gtk-icon-theme-name = "Tango"

to ~/.gtkrc-2.0 (just create the file if it does not exist).

The second problem can be fixed by selecting another icon theme, which contains MIME icons (for example the Rodent icon theme, or the GNOME icon theme). In Xfce, you can do this by opening the User Interface preferences from the Settings Manager, and choosing a different theme in the Icon Theme page.

Thunar will be updated to comply with the Icon Naming Specification once the spec enters an usable state and the majority of icon themes follows the spec.

Depending on your system you might need to install the default GNOME icon theme in addition to your preferred icon theme (the Debian/Ubuntu package name is gnome-icon-theme). In either case the hicolor-icon-theme must be installed.

Thunar uses various tricks to convert file names to UTF-8 (which is required to handle filenames in the user interface). File names with invalid encoding (neither UTF-8/ASCII, nor the specified GLib file system encoding) may look different (i.e. invalid characters replaced with ? characters). Because the file name is garantied to be valid UTF-8 once Thunar has read them, the bulk renamer can handle them afterwards. There’s no explicit renamer module to just save the file names with the UTF-8 encoding, tho.

It’s on the move, see bug 1830.

It already does! Just mount your shares and go to them with Thunar! Just kidding.

You are obviously asking about Thunar being able to discover remote machines on a network and mount/unmount shares from them. What you are asking for is nice, but there is no common framework for it yet that Thunar can build on.

Thunar is designed to be a file manager, not a network file system manager. Once such a beast exists, Thunar and all other applications will be able to use it, and you can browse your samba or NFS shares in firefox or emacs, whatever.

Short answer: not any time soon unless you write it yourself.

For Linux users, and especially Xubuntu users, the following thread can help: Xubuntu How to: Thunar Native Windows Network Browsing. You will need fusesmb. For me it worked like a charm with Feisty. You should read the post from EatMorePie, as it avoids unnecessary steps.