[Thunar-dev] places panel plugin ideas

[Benedikt Meurer]

Jani Monoses wrote:
> Hi

Hey Jani,

> I am thinking about the best way of implementing a 'Places menu'-like 
> functionality for the new panel using thunar, as it is found in gnome.
> 
> It should resemble the desktop menu plugin instead of a launcher but 
> have filesystem paths as items, much like what is now in thunars left 
> pane. On selecting one, thunar would open at that location, or if 
> already running just open a new window as I assume that thunar's small 
> startup time and footprint is still beaten by just telling a running 
> thunar to open a window.

You can just run

 Thunar $PATH

it'll reuse an existing instance (well, not yet, but soon), similar to
the way Terminal works.

A thunar-places-plugin should be easy to write. You might want to check
the ThunarShortcutsModel class to get the basic idea. I dunno if such a
plugin should be part of Thunar/xfce4-panel, maybe start with a goodie
first, or even better, start with a bugzilla RFE. ;-)

> Another interesting feature would be having a recent documents item 
> which would launch entries in ~/.recently-used using thunar-vfs, but I
> am not sure if thunar-launcher bits are exported.

Everything you need is exported by thunar-vfs: Since you know the mime
type, you'll just need to ask ThunarVfsMimeDatabase for the default
application. The only thing you might miss is the chooser dialog if no
application is known for the mime type, this is currently part of the
Thunar binary, but since it doesn't really depend on any Thunar
internals, it could be moved to thunar-vfs as well.

> Jani

Benedikt