Arch linux file manager

File manager functionality

This article outlines the additional software packages necessary to expand the features and functionality of file managers, particularly where using a window manager such as Openbox. The ability to access partitions and removable media without a password — if affected — has also been provided.

Contents

Overview

A file manager alone will not provide the features and functionality that users of full desktop environments such as Xfce or KDE will be accustomed to. This is because additional software packages will be required to enable a given file manager to:

• Display and access other partitions
• Display, mount, and access removable media (e.g. USB sticks, optical discs, and digital cameras)
• Enable networking / shared networks with other installed operating systems
• Enable thumbnailing
• Archive and extract compressed files
• Automatically mount removable media

When a file manager has been installed as part of a full desktop environment, most of these packages will usually have been installed automatically. Consequently, where a file manager has been installed for a standalone window manager then — as is the case with the window manager itself — only a basic foundation will be provided. The user must then determine the nature and extent of the features and functionality to be added.

Additional features

This article or section needs expansion.

Particularly where using — or intending to use — a lightweight environment, it should be noted that more file manager features and functions will usually mean the use of more memory. See also udisks.

Mounting

• The Gnome virtual filesystem ( gvfs ) provides mounting and trash functionality. GVFS uses udisks2 for mounting functionality and is the recommended solution for most file managers.

Folders used by GVFS:

• /usr/lib/gvfs/ contains gvfsd-* files, where * refers to the various supported file system types.
• /usr/share/gvfs/mounts/ contains mount rules for GVFS. To use one’s own rules, create

Additional packages for installation usually follows the gvfs-* pattern, for example:

• gvfs-mtp : media players and mobile devices that use MTP
• gvfs-gphoto2 : digital cameras and mobile devices that use PTP
• gvfs-afc : Apple mobile devices

File manager daemon

The first is to simply autostart or run the installed file manager in daemon mode (i.e. as a background process). For example, when using PCManFM in Openbox, the following command would be added to the

It will also be necessary to configure the file manager itself in respect to volume management (e.g. what it will do and what applications will be launched when certain file types are detected upon mounting).

Standalone

Another option is to install a separate mount application. The advantages of using this are:

• Less memory may be required to run as a background / daemon process than a file manager
• It is not file manager specific, allowing them to be freely added, removed, and switched
• gvfs may not have to be installed for mounting, lessening memory use.

Networks

• obexftpAUR : Bluetooth device mounting and file transfers (see Bluetooth)
• gvfs-smb : Windows File and printer sharing for Non-KDE desktops (see Samba)
• kdenetwork-filesharing : Windows File and printer sharing for KDE (see Samba#KDE)
• sshfs : FUSE client based on the SSH File Transfer Protocol

Windows access

If using gvfs-smb , to access Windows/CIFS/Samba file shares first open the file manager, and enter the following into the path name, changing server_name and share_name as appropriate:

Apple access

AFP support is included in gvfs . To access AFP files first open the file manager, and enter the following into the path name, changing server_name and share_name as appropriate:

Thumbnail previews

Some file managers may not support thumbnailing, even when the packages listed have been installed. Check the documentation for the relevant file manager.

You may not see thumbnails for remote storage, including MTP. Check your file manager’s settings, e.g. for Thunar one has to set «Show thumbnails: always».

File managers other than Dolphin and Konqueror

These packages apply to most file managers, such as PCManFM, SpaceFM, Thunar and xfe AUR . The exceptions are Dolphin and Konqueror, used in the KDE desktop environment.

• tumbler : Image files. This must also be installed to expand thumbnailing capabilities to other file types
• poppler-glib : Adobe .pdf files
• ffmpegthumbnailer : Video files
• freetype2 : Font files
• libgsf : .odf files
• raw-thumbnailer : .raw files
• totem : Video files and tagged audio files (GNOME Files, and Caja only)
• evince or atril : .pdf files
• gnome-epub-thumbnailer : .epub and .mobi ebook files
• mcomix : .cbr comicbook archives
• folderpreviewAUR : folder thumbnailer

Dolphin and Konqueror (KDE)

Use PCManFM to get thumbnails for other file types

This article or section needs language, wiki syntax or style improvements. See Help:Style for reference.

PCManFM supports image thumbnails out of the box. However, in order to view thumbnails of other file types, PCManFM uses the information provided in the files located at /usr/share/thumbnailers . The packages which provide a thumbnailer usually add the corresponding .thumbnail file at /usr/share/thumbnailers . For example, in order to get thumbnails for OpenDocument files, you may install libgsf from the official repositories. For video files’ thumbnails, the package ffmpegthumbnailer is required. For PDF files, you may install evince from the official repositories, which provides evince-thumbnailer and the corresponding file at /usr/share/thumbnailers . However, if you prefer not to install evince , you can also replicate the functionality of evince-thumbnailer using imagemagick ‘s convert command. This is accomplished by creating a new file with the .thumbnailer extension (e.g.: imagemagick-pdf.thumbnailer ) at /usr/share/thumbnailers with the following content:

Following this example, you can specify custom thumbnailers by creating your own .thumbnail files. Keep in mind that %i refers to the input file (the file which will have its thumbnail made), %o to the output file (the thumbnail image) and %s to the size of the thumbnail. These parameters will be automatically substituted with the corresponding data and passed to the thumbnailer program by PCManFM.

Archive files

To extract compressed files such as tarballs ( .tar and .tar.gz ) within a file manager, it will first be necessary to install a GUI archiver such as file-roller . See List of applications/Utilities#Archiving and compression tools for further information. An additional package such as unzip must also be installed to support the use of zipped .zip files. Once an archiver has been installed, files in the file manager may consequently be right-clicked to be archived or extracted.

Archive files are mounted under folder /run/user/$(id -u)/gvfs/ with automatically created mount point that contains full path to the file in its name where all / are replaced with %252F and : replaced with %253A hex codes.

Example of path to the mounted archive /full/path/to/file/name.zip

NTFS read/write support

See the NTFS-3G article.

Desktop notifications

Some file managers make use of desktop notifications to confirm various events and statuses like mounting, unmounting and ejection of removable media.

Enable Trash functionality on different filesystems (external drives)

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Make trash directories .Trash- for each users on the top level of filesystems:

For example (mount point: /media/sdc1, uid: 1000, gid: 1000):

Troubleshooting

«Not Authorized» when attempting to mount drives

File managers using udisks require a polkit authentication agent. See polkit#Authentication agents.

Password required to access partitions

The need to enter a password to access other partitions or mounted removable media will likely be due to the default permission settings of udisks2 . More specifically, permission may be set to the root account only, not the user account. See Udisks#Configuration for details.

Directories are not opened in the file manager

You may find that an application that is not a file manager, Audacious for example, is set as the default application for opening directories — an application that specifies that it can handle the inode/directory MIME type in its desktop entry can become the default. You can query the default application for opening directories with the following command:

To ensure that directories are opened in the file manager, run the following command:

where my_file_manager.desktop is the desktop entry for your file manager — org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop for example.

Some other applications instead use the org.freedesktop.FileManager1 D-Bus protocol (e.g. Firefox). The following shows a list of currently installed services supporting this protocol:

To what file manager is opened, copy the file to $XDG_DATA_HOME/dbus-1/services . Additionally, before the changes become active, kill the program currently implementing the D-Bus service.

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PCManFM

PCManFM is a free file manager application and the standard file manager of LXDE.

Contents

Installation

Install the pcmanfm package, pcmanfm-gtk3 for the GTK3 version or pcmanfm-git AUR for the development version.

gvfs is recommended for trash support, mounting with udisks and remote filesystems.

Desktop management

The command to allow PCManFM to set wallpapers and enable the use of desktop icons is:

The native desktop menu of the window manager will be replaced with that provided by PCManFM. However, it can easily be restored from the PCManFM menu itself by selecting Desktop preferences and then enabling the Right click shows WM menu option in the Desktop tab.

Desktop preferences

If using the native desktop menu provided by a window manager, enter the following command to set or amend desktop preferences at any time:

It is worthwhile to consider adding this command to a keybind and/or the native desktop menu for easy access.

Creating new icons

User content such as text files, documents, images and so forth can be dragged and dropped directly onto the desktop. To create shortcuts for applications it will be necessary to copy their .desktop files to the

/Desktop directory itself. Do not drag and drop the files there as they will be moved completely. The syntax of the command to do so is:

For example — where installed — to create a desktop shortcut for lxterminal , the following command would be used:

For those who used the XDG user directories program to create their $HOME directories no further configuration will be required.

Daemon mode

To run PCManFM in the background (to for example automatically mount removable media), use:

Should automount fail, see udisks.

Autostarting

How PCManFM may be autostarted as a daemon process or to manage the desktop for a standalone window manager will depend on the window manager itself. For example, to enable management of the desktop for Openbox, the following command would be added to the

Review the relevant wiki article and/or official home page for a particular installed or intended window manager. Should a window manager not provide an autostart file, PCManFM may be alternatively autostarted by editing one or both of the following files:

• xinitrc: When using the SLiMdisplay manager or Startx command
• xprofile: When using a display manager such as LXDM or LightDM

Additional features and functionality

Less experienced users should be aware that a file manager alone — especially when installed in a standalone Window manager such as Openbox — will not provide the features and functionality users of full desktop environments such as Xfce and KDE will be accustomed to. Review the file manager functionality article for further information.

Tips and tricks

Get thumbnails for other file types

Set the terminal emulator

You can configure what terminal emulator PCManFM should use for Tools > Open Current Folder in Terminal under Edit > Preferences > Advanced.

i.e «bash -c ‘termite'»

Integrate an archiver

It is possible to choose the integrated archiver under Edit > Preferences > Advanced. PCManFM supports file-roller , xarchiver (or xarchiver-gtk2 ), engrampa and ark .

Templates are accessible under Create New.

PCManFM adds the files in

/Templates as Create New. context menu items on startup.

Thumbnails

Like some other file managers (e.g. Nautilus) PCManFM will load previews of all images in a folder. To not abuse the HDD, keep the number of images in a folder to a hundred.

Troubleshooting

Open With dialog window empty

If you do not see any applications to choose from in the open with dialog, then you can try removing gnome-menus and instead install lxmenu-data . Furthermore, export the following variables:

No «Applications»

You can try this method: Delete all files in the $HOME/.cache/menus directory, and run PCManFM again.

PCManFM requires the environment variable XDG_MENU_PREFIX to be set. The value of the variable should match the beginning of a file present in the /etc/xdg/menus/ directory. E.g. you can set the value in your .xinitrc file with the line:

See these threads for more information: [1], and especially this post from the Linux Mint forums: [2]

No icons

If you are using a window manager instead of a desktop environment and you have no icons for folders and files, specify a GTK icon theme.

If you have e.g. oxygen-icons installed, edit

/.gtkrc-2.0 or /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc and add the following line:

Else, use an different one (gnome, hicolor, and locolor do not work). To list all installed icon themes:

If none of them is suitable, install one. To list all installable icon packages:

No «Previous/Next Folder» functionality with mouse buttons

A method to fix this is with Xbindkeys.

/.xbindkeysrc to contain the following:

Actual button codes can be obtained with package xorg-xev .

/.xinitrc to execute xbindkeys on log-in.

—desktop parameter not working or crashing X-server

Make sure you have ownership and write permissions on

Setting the wallpaper either by using the —desktop-pref parameter or editing

/.config/pcmanfm/default/pcmanfm.config solves the problem.

Terminal emulator advanced configuration not saved

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Make sure you have the right permissions on the libfm configuration file:

Make PCManFM remember your preferred Sort Files settings

You can use View > Sort Files to change the order in which PCManFM lists the files, but PCManFM won’t remember that the next time you start it. To make it remember, go to Edit > Preferences and close. That will write your current sort_type and sort_by values into

«Not authorized» error when attempting to mount drive

Make this polkit rule in /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/00-mount-internal.rules :

And add your user to storage group:

Operation not supported

See the General troubleshooting article on Session permissions.

Passwords are forgotten on system restart

Install a keyring application like GNOME/Keyring, KDE Wallet or lxqt_wallet AUR for network shares or an SSH agent if appropriate.

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