[Thunar-dev] Some ideas to improve Thunar.

[Laurent Meunier]

Hello,

I use Thunar for one month now, and I write to this list to share some 
ideas to improve this wonderful file manager.

1/ Now that Thunar support zoom level to display icons. Could it be 
possible to change zoom level with the mouse, something like ctrl + 
wheelup (zoom in) or wheeldown (zoom out) ?

2/ I like to have big icons when only a few (say less than 10) icons are 
displayed and small icons when there are more. Maybe Thunar could 
calculate icon's size dynamically. I know that Rox does something 
similar, by double-clicking on the window's background, icons and window 
are resized.

3/ What do you think of implementing something like 'find as you type' 
like in Firefox ? This could be very useful to quickly find a file or a 
folder.

4/ About the location bar and navigation buttons, this location selector 
is very useful... until you don't need the next/previous arrow buttons. 
My idea is to use the same size for all buttons and to fill the location 
bar with them (only if necessary). It's hard to explain (and my english 
is very bad ;-) ), so if you want I could take screenshots to show you.

5/ In icon view, with 'Text beside icons' selected and a high zoom 
level, a lot of space is lost. This space could be used to display more 
informations like file size, mime type, mtime, etc. Those informations 
could be displayed juste below file name (in grey to differentiate from 
the file name).

I wait for your comments on these ideas to open "Request for new feature 
or enhancement" in bugzilla.


Something completely different now. I'm currently looking at how to 
implement a thumbnail/preview for text file. What I plan to do :
- modify thunar-vfs/thunar-vfs-thumb.c to handle text/plain as image/jpeg
- create 2 files thunar-vfs/thunar-vfs.thumb-text.{c,h} based on the 
files thunar-vfs/thunar-vfs.thumb-jpeg.{c,h}
- in thunar-vfs/thunar-vfs.thumb-text.c, implements the function :

GdkPixbuf*
thunar_vfs_thumb_text_load (const gchar *path,
                             gint         size)
{
   /* draw on a pixmap using pango */
   /* convert pixmap to pixbuf     */
   /* return the pixbuf            */
}

Benedikt, please correct me if I'm doing something wrong. I'm pretty new 
to C and gtk, so I will certainly make mistakes ;-)


Laurent