[Thunar-dev] plugin discussion

[Benedikt Meurer]

Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Yes, I know it's premature to discuss Thunar plugins at this point, as
> there may not even be a plugin interface in 1.0.  Having said that,
> there's been a lot of unproductive discussion over the past couple weeks
> about pet features that people want that are out of 1.0's scope, and are
> more appropriate for third-party plugins.
> 
> So, with that in mind, I think it might be useful to try to flesh out --
> at a very high level -- what Thunar plugins should look like.
> 
> I can currently think of two types of plugins that could be useful in a
> user-visible way:
> 
> 1) View plugins: plugins that add an extra view type to complement icon
> view, list view, etc.  A thumbnail view would fit here, if it's not
> included in Thunar proper.
> 
> 2) Action plugins: plugins that add file/directory actions, that are
> probably added to the right-click context menu.  Examples might include
> a plugin to create a tarball of a directory, or open an email window
> with a file attached.

I thought of supporting gscripts here instead of adding them as plugins. 
This makes it easier for users to add stuff here and it's really not 
necessary to load code into the file manager to achieve these kinds of 
tasks.

 From my current plan, we have the following interfaces, that can be 
implemented by plugins:

1) ThunarView
2) ThunarSidePane
3) ThunarLocationBar
4) ThunarFile (not actually an interface, but an abstract base class)
5) ThunarFolder

With these interfaces, you can probably add any kind of behaviour that I 
can think of (atleast anything that makes sense for Thunar). But 
currently, these interfaces aren't finished and as said very often 
lately, the plugin manager is not even in design stage.

> Perhaps someone should set up a wiki page for this, and we should start
> listing features that are candidates for plugins.  At least, that way,
> if someone comes on the mailing list saying they think feature X should
> be present in Thunar's core, we can say "no, that's something suitable
> for a plugin, see [URL]".  I wouldn't mind setting up this page (Benny,
> I'd need a wiki login for that).

Done.

> 	-brian

Benedikt