Thunar

Thunar

Thunar is a file manager, that stays lightweight whilst providing more features and PCManFM. Features include Bulk Rename, Trash bin, plugins and custom actions, which allow you to add commands to the right click context menu.

Installing

Thunar is not included with CrunchBang by default.

To install and replace PCManFM with Thunar, follow this guide.

Plugins

Many plugins are available from the repository.

thunar-volman: Automatic management of removable drives and media.
thunar-thumbnailers: Additional support for thumbnails of less common formats
ffmpegthumbnailer: Generate thumbnails of videos
thunar-archive-plugin: Add support for extracting and compressing archives
thunar-media-tags-plugin: Allows you to add an modify file tags

to install them all, in a terminal type:

sudo apt-get install thunar-volman thunar-thumbnailers ffmpegthumbnailer thunar-archive-plugin thunar-media-tags-plugin

for more information on installing applications see here.

Thunar plugin page.

Custom Actions

Custom actions allow you to use command line tools to do things in Thunar. They can be added and modified from Thunar's top level 'Edit' menu under 'Configure custom actions…'

You will already be able to see a custom action, 'open a terminal here', you will see this option when you right click in the main window.

To add another click the 'plus' button on the right.

Adding Custom Actions

This example will add an option to emulate PCmanFm's 'Open selected folder as root' option:

select 'Edit' from the top level menu and 'Configure custom actions…'
In the configure custom actions window select new.
Choose a name and description that you would like to appear in the right click menu.
the command you should use is:

gksu thunar %f

'Gksu' is the command to run something as root, see here for an explanation. The Thunar window has an explanation of what the '%' options do, in this case if will open the new window in any files that have been selected, if not it will open it in the current directory.

Now you need to configure when you can use it, select the 'Appearance Conditions' tab.
'File pattern' allows you to define when the options appear, if you were to write a custom action to modify html files then you would use '*.html' (note you may need to cover other naming conventions, eg *.htm would be needed aswell). We don't need to define a file type here so we can leave it as '*' (which matches anything).
Next the 'appears if selection contains' tick boxes, these do a similar job as file pattern, but don't rely on the file name, which is helpful for things like directories. We only want the option of opening selected directories, so this is the only box we need to tick.
Click 'Ok' then 'Close' and you will see the option when you right click on the main window, or on a directory.

Useful Custom Actions

Open a root terminal in the current directory:

gksu terminator

resize jpg images, don't add this command directly, save it and call the script from thunar. For help on downloading and making this script executable see Installing Scripts.

#! /bin/sh                                                      
mkdir -p ./Resized/$1
for file; do
    if [ ! -e $file ]; then
        continue
    fi
    toname="./Resized/"$1"/"$( echo $file | cut -f1 -d.)"_"$1".jpg"
    convert -geometry $1x$1 -quality 100 $file $toname
done

to run it, assuming you saved it as 'resize', and want to change the size to 640×640 (add extra custom actions for different sizes):

resize 640 %N

it will then save the resized jpgs in a subdirectory of the current directory called 'Resized'.

Bulk Rename

As mentioned Thunar has includes a handy Bulk Renamer. To use it open a terminal and run:

thunar -B

You could also use this command in a custom action.