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System-wide Thunar custom actions

What is this?

The Thunar file browser has this awesome custom actions feature which can make working with Thunar pretty productive and personal.

Unfortunately, Thunar is not very flexible when it comes to the storing location of these custom actions: There is only one file ~/.config/Thunar/uca.xml that can contain custom actions for that specific user. As far as I know, there is no possibility to define system-wide custom actions that apply to every user.

This is an attempt to realize system-wide Thunar custom actions that can easily be updated and maintained.

Motivation

Writing your own custom actions for Thunar by hand can become frustrating pretty quickly. Eventually you will come to the point, where you would like to make it a little more sophisticated by adding one or more of the features below. This piece of software thunar-custom-actions addresses all of the following features:

Feature	Approach
ensure all needed software is present, e.g. on configuration migration or system reinstallation	configure or rather the Depends: section in the debian package
ensure the actions work regardless of ugly characters in the filename (e.g. whitespace)	sensible shell programming
ensure existing files don't get accidentally overwritten	ask the user for overwriting confirmation
ensure a broken or failing action command does not accidentally delete files	cache an action's output in a temporary file before copying it over to the final location
indicate progress on long-running actions	where possible, display a progressbar
be able to interrupt an action	the Cancel button on the progressbar
warn if an action failed	show a warning message
provide translations	localisation with gettext
maintenance: be able to apply changes to all actions at once	use m4 as preprocessor

What can it do?

There are currently actions for:

• rotating images
• shrinking images
• grayscaling images
• filling transparent areas in images with a given color
• converting images to an A4 multi-page PDF document
• converting images to arbitrary formats
• concatenating PDF documents into one
• shrinking PDF file sizes
• de/encrypting arbitrary files with GPG (both symmetrically and asymmetrically)
• finding big elements in a folder
• creating symbolic links to files and folders
• showing checksums (MD5,SHA1,SHA256) of files

Screenshots

See some screenshots:

Rotating images

Converting images to PDF

Converting images to arbitrary formats

Encrypting files

Symmetrically (with password)

Aymmetrically (with public key)

You then have to specify the recipient's public key from a list generated from a parsed output of gpg2 --list-public-keys:

Finding space-consuming elements in a folder

Showing checksums of files

Overwriting confirmation

How does it work?

At its heart, thunar-custom-actions is actually just the script (Makefile) bin/uca-apply that instructs the Python script bin/uca-manip to merge or remove the custom actions provided by thunar-custom-actions (the files share/thunar-custom-actions/system-uca/*.xml) into [the|each] user's Thunar configuration ~/.config/Thunar/uca.xml.

The actions itself are (pretty long) pre-processed shell commands in the <command>-tags of the configuration file. The macro language m4 is used for pre-processing. This enables sophisticated commands to be written as very simple m4-macros which are scalable and easily maintainable.

The Debian package takes care of the actions provided by thunar-custom-actions automatically:

• adding them to the users' configurations on package installation
• removing them from the users' configurations on package removal
• removing the old, then adding the new actions on package update

The manual installation requires the user to do this himself.

The action merging/removal process is designed to NOT touch the actions that were there before! It should leave them totally untouched. So you should be safe to just try thunar-custom-actions and if you don't like it, uninstall it again without causing any damage to your configuration. But as always, you are encouraged to backup your ~/.config/Thunar/uca.xml file before using thunar-custom-actions if you care about your already-defined custom actions.

Installation

I am testing thunar-custom-actions regularly on several different machines running Xubuntu 16.04 LTS. Actually, as long as you get it ./configured without errors, it should work regardless of the system used.

Disclaimer: I am paying a lot of attention here to prevent data loss or data corruption when executing the Thunar custom actions provided by thunar-custom-actions (e.g. by caching in temporary files, asking for overwriting permission, catching errors, etc...). Nonetheless I cannot guarantee that there are no cases where something might go haywire. So please use the actions provided with responsibility and the fact in mind that a mere mortal created them. I suggest you backup sensitive or important data you care about before running a custom action from here on it.

If you encounter any problems installing or using thunar-custom-actions, feel free to open a new Issue here on GitHub and describe your problem.

Debian package

On Debian-based systems, thunar-custom-actions is best installed or updated via the Debian package. A Debian package is obtainable either:

• via Download from the releases page on GitHub or
• by creating it directly from the repository with dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc (You might need to sudo apt-get install dpkg-dev before.)

Then install the *.deb-package like so:

sudo dpkg -i thunar-custom-actions*.deb || sudo apt-get install -f -y

Apt repository (automatic updates)

If you use my apt repository, installation is even easier:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install thunar-custom-actions

Also, you will get automatic updates when using my repository.

By hand

You can also install thunar-custom-actions by hand. You may want to do that if you don't have root privileges on your machine, or you are using a distribution that does not utilise the .deb software package format.

# clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/nobodyinperson/thunar-custom-actions
cd thunar-custom-actions
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local PASSWDFILE=/etc/passwd
make
make install

Errors when running ./configure are most likely connected to requirements not being installed. It will tell you what's missing.

To merge the actions provided by thunar-custom-actions into your Thunar configuration, run:

uca-apply update

If you don't want them anymore, run:

uca-apply remove

To uninstall thunar-custom-actions, run from the git repository root:

make uninstall

To upgrade to the latest development version, run from the repository root:

uca-apply remove
make uninstall
git pull
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local PASSWDFILE=/etc/passwd
make
make install
uca-apply update

Troubleshooting

Help, there are no new actions after the installation!

If you installed it manually, make sure that you did a uca-apply update afterwards to actually merge the actions provided by thunar-custom-actions into your Thunar configuration.

You may also close all thunar instances, run thunar -q from the terminal and then re-check if there are still no actions.

Help, I clicked on an action but nothing happens!

Okay, this should theoretically not happen. This probably means that either I didn't cover a special case in the code or that a software requirement is missing on your machine. To get more information on your problem:

• start thunar from the command-line
• repeat the steps to produce your problem
• save the output from the terminal
• open a new Issue here on GitHub and paste it there so I can help you.

Help, I changed my system's language but the actions are still in the old language!

This is because Thunar drops all translations but the current locale from its custom actions configuration file. Close all Thunar windows, then run uca-apply remove && uca-apply update && thunar -q to re-add all translations. The next time Thunar is opened, it will again remove all translations but the (desired) current locale.

How to contribute

See the instructions in CONTRIBUTING.md.