Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Saturday, October 17, 2015 at 22:21

After Nemo and Nautilus, now we bring you Thunar. It is one of the simplest file manager (graphical) available in Linux. Simple means Thunar is easy to use. We will cover some important features of Thunar. We hope it helps new users into Xubuntu or any XFCE based Linux distro.


Overview


  1. Menubar.
  2. Toolbar (back, forward, up, home).
  3. Address bar.
  4. Left panel (devices, places, and network).
  5. Main area.
  6. Status bar.

Concepts

  1. Thunar created to be simple. So it is simple both in appearance and number of features.  
  2. Thunar shares similar visual concept with Nautilus and Mac OS X Finder, especially its left panel. 
  3. Thunar has no Ctrl+F (Search Files) feature.
  4. Thunar has no split view just like current Nautilus.

New Tab

To open new tab, press Ctrl+T. To close current tab, press Ctrl+W.




New Folder

To create new folder, right-click main area > Create Folder. Or, press Ctrl+Shift+N.

Delete Folder

To delete a folder not permanently, just select > right-click > Move To Trash. To delete permanently, select > Shift+Delete.

Sort By

To sort files, Thunar offers sorting based on Name, Size, Type, or Date.

Emblem

Thunar gives ex old GNOME users what was missing from current Nautilus: emblems. You can attach one or two emblems to distinguish your favorite folder from another.


Tree

To change left panel into tree mode, open menu View > Side Pane > Tree. To revert it back, open menu View > Side Pane > Shortcuts. Shortcut for this is Ctrl+E.



Send To

Thunar has Send To feature just like Explorer. For example, suppose you want to copy a file into USB flash drive. Right-click a file > send to > drive name.


Bookmark

To create a bookmark for a folder, drag folder icon and drop into PLACES in left panel.

Open Terminal Here

Right-click main area > Open Terminal Here. In Xubuntu, Thunar has this feature. It will help you work with Terminal seamlessly.