Good news fellow Xfce users, we proudly present a new Thunar release, our beloved easy-to-use and fast file manager!

The main highlight in this release is that Thunar, as all Xfce components, is saying goodbye to Gtk+ 2 and is now Gtk+ 3 based. Other than that, our team has addressed several critical bugs that compromised Thunar’s stability. Most of those fixes were backported to 1.6.x series and we hope our users do not experience crashes anymore.

By the way, by “our team” I mean Alexander Schwinn and myself, as well as all other developers which contributed to the project, specifically Jonas Kümmerlin, without his work we wouldn’t get here.

We picked up where Jonas left off, his initial port saved us a lot of work, with few adjustments we got Thunar to run under Gtk+ 3. But so we discovered this was no easy job, let’s just say Gtk+ migration path was far from a smooth experience. Besides fixing bugs and regressions, new features were introduced. Not to mention the wonderful work done by translators in promptly updating translations.

What Thunar 1.8.0 has to offer?

  • A completely revised pathbar

    • Buttons next/previous/up/home added
    • Click on the right filler opens path as editable string
    • Here’s a comparison between the old pathbar and the new one Thunar comparison
  • GObject Introspection support for thunarx

    • It paves the way to new language bindings
    • Thunarx-python has already been updated
  • Minor improvements:

    • Show file size as well in bytes
    • Add systemd user unit for D-Bus session services
    • Make it possible to assign accelerators to custom actions
    • Enable Thunar UCA (User Configurable Actions) for remote locations
    • Refreshed tray icons for file transfer
    • Improved various styling details

While moving to Gtk+ 3 it was necessary to replace parts of the Thunar Plugin API (thunarx). It means that to update to Thunar 1.8.0 one should also update all installed thunar-plugins and xfdesktop to their latest versions, see the compability matrix for more details.

A complete list of added features, bug fixes and translation changes can be found in the NEWS file.

That’s it, we hope you enjoy the new Thunar.