[Thunar-dev] Thunar Configuration and Preferences

[Erik Harrison]

Okay, since I'm limited in what I can do till tuesday, when I get
bandwidth to the house, I figured I'd start this ball rolling here, as
best I could.

I'd like to avoid having anyone pipe in with a major rethink of the
current UI for Thunar. That said, what are the kinds of knobs that
people need for their file manager?

My personal impression of the common use case for configuring you file
manager, is to make a few changes to optimize it for you general use,
and then leave them.

For example, with Xffm, I turn just about everything off. I clear out
all the branches save home, I cut out the right toolbar, and I set the
top toolbar to use Terminal as my, well, terminal. I also cut all the
extra columns except the date.

That makes me pretty much set.

There are a couple of things that may fall under preferences. One is
GUI configuration. The second is behaviour. The third is tools that
manage meta data that the file manager keeps.

For example, take Firefox. Configuring the toolbars is the first,
disabling and reenabling the pop up blocker is the second, and
managing mappings between mime types and actions is the third.

I think that moving lots of the configuration out of the preferences
dialog and into the application itself is a good thing (like editable
toolbars). But overall, what are you going to need to change, and when
and how often are you going to change it?

-- 
"This brings me back to a time where I had no worries. 
All I needed to do was watch Perfect Strangers."
-Erik