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Thunar's icon

Thunar - XFCE & XUbuntu’s small but perfectly formed file manager - has a simple mechanism that allows you to easily add new commands to the right click menu of files and folders. These are called Custom Actions and are easy to create…​ here’s how to do it.

Click the Edit menu, then click ‘Configure custom actions…​‘. This will take you to the Custom Actions Manager, where you can create, edit or delete your custom actions.

You can enter anything into the command box, including complex bash scripts, names of scripts or executables on the PATH, or the full path and filename of the command you want to run.

thunar custom actions edit 1

On the ‘Appearance Conditions‘ tab, you tell Thunar when you want your item to appear in the right click menu:

thunar custom actions edit 3
Figure 1. Now, when I right click on a text file, I …
Continue reading “Useful Thunar Custom Actions”

I switched my XFCE machines over to use Compton for window compositing today - and it’s a noticeable improvement.

A compositor glues your stacks of windows together to form the final image that you see on screen. It’s responsible for any fancy effects like drop-shadows, as well drawing windows while dragging, resizing and minimizing or maximizing them. [1]

Compton does this beautifully. It does one thing and it does it well. It provides glassy smooth, tear free compositing and supports a few tasteful effects - drop shadows, fades and transparency.

I stumbled across this while searching for something else and found a great guide in the NeoWin forums [2], where most of this info comes from, so thanks ViperAFK.

Switch off the existing compositor

Screenshot of the XFCE Applications menu, with the Settings Manager highlighted.

You’ll need to switch of any existing compositing you’ve got running, otherwise this won …

Continue reading “How to switch to Compton for beautiful tear free compositing in XFCE

Blueprint style diagram showing the compose key sequence for the Euro currency symbol.
Figure 1. Just hold down your chosen compose key, then press the other keys in turn: [compose key] + e + = gets you a Euro symbol.

The compose key on Linux is incredibly useful, but not configured by default - and on XFCE there’s currently no graphical UI to change it. However, it’s pretty simple to change…​ here’s how to make the Caps Lock key your compose key:

In the file /etc/default/keyboard, change XKBOPTIONS to look like this:

XKBOPTIONS="compose:caps"

Save the file. You can now either reboot, restart X, or see Activating your change without rebooting, below.

If you don’t want to use Caps Lock as your compose key, there are some other options to choose from in this file: /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.lst - search for ‘compose’, they’re listed towards the …

Continue reading “How to set your Compose Key on XFCE/Xubuntu & LXDE Linux”