[Thunar-dev] Adding Column View to Thunar

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hey,

On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:33:36 -0500
Will Walthall <ghthor at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_Columns
> 
> I'm extremely fond of the Xfce desktop environment. But I really enjoy
> Column View for viewing Directory Trees and the dolphin file manager
> isn't able to replace thunar as far as I'm concerned. I'm wondering
> what it would take to implement this in thunar.  And if you guys
> could point me to the part of the source code I should start looking
> at to implement this feature in thunar.  

The main entry points for this are the classes
ThunarStandardView, ThunarDetailsView and ThunarIconView.

ThunarStandardView is an abstract base class that has to be implemented
by all views. It wraps common functionality needed by all views and
defines some virtual functions subclasses have to implement themselves.
It uses a ThunarListModel (an implementation of GtkTreeModel and
GtkTreeSortable) for representing files in the current folder.

ThunarDetailsView and ThunarIconView are two implementations of
ThunarStandardView. They are what you see in the main area of Thunar
when you browse your file system. ThunarDetailsView could be of special
interest here because it uses a GtkTreeView which probably is what
you'd want to use in a multi-column view as well.

I'm not 100% sure ThunarStandardView is generic enough to serve as the
base class for a multi-column view though. You'd probably have to
maintain your own ThunarListModel copies for parent/child directories
internally in addition to the ThunarListModel for the current folder
(which is maintained by ThunarStandardView). 

I haven't experimented with this myself yet, but I like the idea and
this feature is one of the things I had planned to look into once I'd
be less busy, so I'd be happy to see this being worked on.

Cheers,
Jannis
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