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Thunar 1.2 Roadmap (Xfce 4.8)

Finish the Port to IO/GVfs

The goal is to finish the work done in the migration-to-gio branch early in the cycle and to merge it into master. It will require a lot of testing and thus, this has to be done soon.

Completed: 100% (merged into master)
Assignee: Jannis
Difficulty: Easy

Volume Monitoring

GVfs provides volume monitoring based on HAL (or gnome-disk-utility/DeviceKit-disks in more recent versions). However, I see it as my responsibility to maintain a feature parity before and after the migration to GIO without additional dependencies. As a consequence, we'll need a volume monitor extension for GIO that is either written on DeviceKit-disks or HAL. HAL shouldn't be too hard as we might be able to re-use a lot of code from ThunarVFS. I already started an implementation based on DeviceKit-disks which is far from being finished though.

Note that thunar-volman uses HAL and for a good integration of Thunar and thunar-volman, it'd be wise to use the same toolkit (either HAL or DeviceKit-disks) in both applications.

Completed: 100% (merged into master)
Assignee: Jannis
Difficulty: Moderate

thunar-volman

This is not part of Thunar itself but I'd consider it an integral part of the user experience Thunar provides. It depends on HAL and only requires very few modifications to work with GIO. In fact, it only uses ThunarVFS for monitoring its config file. If we port it to xfconf it wouldn't even require GIO. (This is the easy part.)

If we are to use DeviceKit-disks in Thunar, we're also required to port thunar-volman to it. (This is the moderate part.)

Completed: 100% (merged into master)
Assignee: Jannis
Difficulty: Easy-Moderate

Integration of Remote Locations in the Side/Tree Pane

Right now, there is no way to “bookmark” remote locations. Thunar only allows directories as bookmarks. I've heard reports that re-using the existing bookmarks concept for was found to be inappropriate and confusing for end users. http://www.bomahy.nl/hylke/blog/clutter-in-nautilus-sidebar/ might be a good starting point for a better side pane. I'm conerned about high numbers of partitions in the side pane though. We probably want something that can be expanded/collapsed better, e.g. by grouping partitions per drive using a custom composite widget. This would also have user experience benefits as people would be able to mount/unmount entire drives at once and not just individual partitions.

Completed: 0%
Assignee: Jannis
Difficulty: Moderate

Improve Tumbler Integration

Right now Thunar only generates thumbnails (on-demand, which is good). It should also use the cache API provided by tumbler to e.g. delete a thumbnail when a file is removed or to copy/update the thumbnail when a file is copied. Stuff like that. That needs integration of ThunarThumbnailer in various jobs which is not too complicated.

Completed: 0%
Assignee: Jannis
Difficulty: Easy

Port Thumbnailers to Tumbler

Tumbler will play an important role in Thunar once the GIO branch has been merged. The JPEG and font thumbnailers built into ThunarVFS will need to be rewritten as tumbler plugins. We also need an additional plugin to load and execute custom ThunarVFS thumbnailers for backwards compatibility reasons.

Completed: 70% (pixbuf, font and JPEG/EXIF thumbnailer plugins have been merged into tumbler)
Assignee: Jannis
Difficulty: Moderate

Extend the D-Bus Interface

Several things are planned here. First of all, I'd like to merge the org.xfce.FileManager and org.xfce.Thunar interfaces. This is not much of a big deal. Secondly, I plan to make all file operations and also the properties dialog available through the interface so that xfdesktop doesn't have to ship its own implements and dialog.

Completed: 90% (need to check if anything that xfdesktop has not been added yet)
Assignee: Jannis
Difficulty: Easy

Startup Notification in UCA plugin

It would be nice if the UCA plugin has a checkbox for startup notification, so (for example) showing a terminal window works properly with focus stealing. Possibly also port to GAppInfo and drop the custom exec code.

Completed: 100%
Assignee: Nick
Difficulty: Easy