After using XFCE as my main desktop
environment for over a month now, I've concluded that while it's
mostly good, there is one aspect of it that needs much work.
It's Thunar. And it totally blows. Let
me explain why;
For a start, it's unnecessary. XFCE is
not, and never will be, as light weight as LXDE (see
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_desktop_vitals&num=1
). Therefore the argument that a new lightweight file manager needed
to be written from scratch is ridiculous - What has resulted is a
large amount of wasted effort to produce a file manager that is
severely limited in its functionality. If a user needs a seriously
lightweight system so badly that they are going to care about the
file manager, they will use
LXDE, not XFCE.
What
should happen is the porting of Nautilus from Gnome 2.x, a much more
fully featured file manager, and in my experience, not too heavy a
footprint to warrant writing a new file manager. Unfortunately I
can't, because installing Nautilus makes my Xubuntu system incredibly
unstable, not to mention you need to remap every single
menu item from the main panel.
So if we overlook
the fact that Thunar shouldn't exist in the first place, we are
slapped in the face with how fucking terrible it is at odd moments:
- The name is
stupid. I understand like how like, totally like lame a name like
“File Manager” is and like how awesome and cool like a Nose God
Thunar is. But seriously did your twelve year old name is? To add
further insult to the injury, the black and white logo from the about
screen looks like it was cut and pasted from some geocities website:
Urgh.
- The main window
is really ugly too:
Notice how the
side pane extends the full height of the window, yet the navigation
bar mysteriously starts at the top of the directory view pane? Why?
It just looks odd. The navigation bar should be above the side
pane and the directory view pane. And the navigation buttons are
rounded, rather than arrows pointing into each other. This
immediately doesn't make it obvious what you're looking at is a
directory, and virtually every other linux file manager on the planet does
the arrow layout. It's like the godamn hipster of file managers.
- There are no
tabs. Seriously what is that like, 15 lines of code to implement?
Come on.
- Wanna see the
size of my folders brah?
That's right, you
are literally seeing, the size of my folders. Not what's in them. How
retarded is that? Why the hell would anyone EVER want to know the
size of the actual folder rather than the size of it's contents. I
can't even change it to something more useful like “number of
items” because Thunar is so impoverished for functionality. Also how is a "/" 4.1 kB? That seems huge.
- Thunar is
unable to remember the size and location of windows. Annoying.
- Thunar has
virtually no support for removable media. You can mount/unmount and
browse them, and that's pretty much all folks. You cannot format
them, view or use any special permissions and half the time, you
can't eject a mass storage device because something is still using
it, despite Thunar giving you no clue what that something actually
is. Also, certain removable media stays greyed out in unmounted mode
on your desktop for weeks even after it has long been physically
removed from your system.
- When you make an
alias/link in Thunar, if you move the original file, The link no
longer works.
- There's no
“undo” option.
- There's no merge
option
- Contrary to the
“Linux philosophy”, an excuse given by my best friend whenever I
moan about annoying I find many aspects of open source software,
Thunar is almost Mac like in its inablity to be customised. Go ahead,
open up the preferences menu and take a look for yourself.
- Thunar has
extensions, of which exactly zero of which are desirable. All I want
is drop box. Seriously.
And that's it for
now, I have been compiling a list of what I found annoying over the
last week, but it's mysteriously gone and Thunar has no menu for
recently viewed documents. Urgh.
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