[Thunar-dev] Icon overlays

[Benedikt Meurer]

Pat Carr wrote:
> Hello folks,
> 
>    I have been using TortoiseSVN for over a year now, and it seems like 
> the only app I enjoy using on Windows, that I can't have in Linux. I 
> have been looking around for a project like that but so far I found none 
>   similar to TSVN. It blends file management and source control with 
> icon overlays to show the state of the files (up-to-date, modified, 
> etc). Also adds context menus to the files/dirs to diff, commit, merge etc.
>    Thunar is looking pretty damn good, Good Job Benny(TM). So I thought 
> of this feature of icon overlays as an extension to Thunar, but reading 
> over the docs and code for the extension API, I fail to see where/how 
> this could be added. Is it possible now and I'm just blind and couldn't 
> see it? Is this something worth adding for the future?

Right now it's not possible. It could be added to thunarx, probably in
the same way it is done in Nautilus, but that would cause too much
trouble (in Nautilus this expected to be done asynchronously, which is
both tricky for the file manager and even more problematic for the
plugin writer). But since determining the proper emblems from the SVN
sandbox, doing it synchronously may block the GUI for some time.

My preferred way would be to allow extensions to hook into thunar-vfs
(-> thunar_vfs_info_new_internal to be exact) and provide additional
information about the file. But this is also somewhat tricky.

Personally, I'm not a fan of CVS/SVN integration in a file manager. IMHO
it makes more sense to integrate it into the IDE (i.e. Eclipse is a good
example here).

> Cheers,
> -Pat

Benedikt