A better toolbar for Thunar

 
Welcome to my first Xfce development update for 2022. Happy new year!

Toolbar and Custom Actions

The problem

  In the past, there have been quite a few discussions about the toolbar and which items it should contain.
Both developers and community members wondered: “Should the reload button be removed?”, “Why isn’t the search button a toggle in the toolbar?”, “Should toggle buttons exist in the toolbar?”.
As you might expect, there was no perfect answer to those questions. Some people liked one thing, other people liked the exact opposite.

  You can see all that in the following links:

• Move the reload button
• Remove the reload button
• Move the search button to the toolbar
• Add Zoom buttons in the toolbar

The solution

  Here comes Merge Request 173 which introduces the ability to customize the toolbar. That is done through
a new “Toolbar Editor”, which is based on the existing “Columns Editor”, where the user can reorder and hide toolbar items.

  Instead of being satisfied with the ability to customize the toolbar using built-in items, I decided to take it a step further and give users the option to add their custom actions to it.
Presently, only actions that are used on directories can be displayed as items in the toolbar but in the future we could expand that functionality if there is user demand.

Other improvements

  I have also been working on some smaller improvements.
Thunar can now handle shortcuts that include the ‘Tab’ key and I am prototyping a spinner element to let users know when a search is ongoing.

Future plans

  This is probably the last big feature that I will develop for Thunar 4.18. After this is merged I will probably focus on fixing regressions and bugs.

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