+++
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.