From 8a56ac586e0c152bf9aaff3b479409d715a2eda6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Wolfgang Müller
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2021 17:52:03 +0100
Subject: content: Add new post: "Filtering files in Thunar"

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+date = 2021-11-27T17:51:10+01:00
+title = "Filtering files in Thunar"
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["TIL"]
++++
+
+[Thunar](https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/start), XFCE's file manager, was a
+pretty late addition to my core set of tools that I rely on to accomplish
+day-to-day tasks. I started using it heavily maybe 2 or 3 years ago. For the
+longest time before that I had been using [ranger](https://ranger.github.io/), a
+console file manager.
+
+The ability to move and copy files around between multiple directories using
+drag-and-drop is basically Thunar's killer feature for me. I'm often faster
+using the mouse to select a bunch of files and then quickly dragging them
+someplace else. In comparison, ranger's select-then-yank-and-paste workflow
+feels very cumbersome.
+
+However, there's always been a feature in ranger that Thunar did not have - the
+very simple but powerful ability to filter the current directory listing by
+showing only files matching a given pattern. There's a more or less hidden way
+to have Thunar select files matching a wildcard with `CTRL-S`, but that relies
+on popping up an extra dialogue, and doesn't play well with interactive use.
+
+Very early on I found
+[a feature request](https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/-/issues/2)
+for this, but it looked largely abandoned and I forgot about it until today
+when, to my extreme surprise, I discovered that it was implemented just 3 months
+ago.  There does not seem to have been any large fanfare around it; the
+changelog
+[buries it](https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/-/blob/eb2b1b284d08d045cf393bcbf2045965f263d781/NEWS#L65)
+in more miscellaneous changes. Not a big deal.
+
+Way more worrisome, however, is that the
+[commit](https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/-/merge_requests/136/diffs?commit_id=d6f916eb2b478a49c5b3ba453e773f81154dbd74)
+implementing the feature does not introduce any user-facing documentation.
+Nowhere is explained how the new feature works and what its limitations are. I
+had to go read
+[the
+code](https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/-/blob/d6f916eb2b478a49c5b3ba453e773f81154dbd74/thunar/thunar-list-model.c#L2113)
+to find out why my search results were littered with seemingly random files in
+other directories. Turns out that it consults files in `GtkRecent` too, merging
+results in the current directory with matches of files you had recently opened,
+regardless of their location.
+
+A terrible default in my opinion, so I immediately turned it off by disabling
+the
+[`gtk-recent-files-enabled`](https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/gtk/gtk4/property.Settings.gtk-recent-files-enabled.html)
+property in my GTK config. Thankfully you can still do that, albeit in a
+system-wide fashion, but I don't care about recent files.
+
+Still, it's really sad I had to go out of my way to find that out. A less
+tech-savvy user could not have done that so easily. It would lower the bar
+tremendously here to **describe** what a new feature does and point out **how to
+configure it**.
+
+A failure to do so makes software intransparent and hostile, furthers the notion
+that the user experience is inherently bad, and very quickly leads to
+resignation in the common user base.
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