[Thunar-dev] Some ideas to improve Thunar.

[Benedikt Meurer]

Laurent Meunier wrote:
> 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) ?

Doable, but don't think that's really required. How often does one
change the zoom level?

> 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.

This has been discussed earlier and won't be implemented in Thunar.

> 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.

The detailed list view already support this. ExoIconView/ThunarIconView
support is on the way (http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1359).

> 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.

Please take a screenshot then.

> 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).

File a feature request for it. Dunno if it will make it into 1.0.

> 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 ;-)

There's already a feature request for this
(http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233). But this shouldn't be
implemented at the thunar-vfs level. This should be implemented in
ThunarIconFactory, but right now I dunno if it will/should be included
in 1.0.

> Laurent

Benedikt