So in this Thunar-themed entry I am going to  show you two different features for Thunar that will bring it up to par with the competition. One of these features is built into Thunar, and the other is an add on. After you’ve included the use of these two items in your general Thunar usage, you might find yourself using Nautilus or Dolphin less and less.

Send to

Included with the Thunar file manager is the ability to send a file to a location. By default Thunar includes Send To entries for:

• Desktop (create a desktop link – icon – for the item.
• Any externally mounted volume.
• Blutooth recipient.
• Email recipient.

You can, of course, extend this Send to menu quite easily. Let’s say you want to add a Flickr entry to the Send to menu. For this you would first want to install the application postr (sudo apt-get install postr will do the trick in Ubuntu). Once you have that installed create the file /usr/share/Thunar/sendto/flickr.desktop and put in it the following contents:
# postr.desktop - Integrate postr into
# the "Send To" menu.
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
TryExec=postr
Exec=postr %F
Icon=postr
Name=Flickr
MimeType=image/jpeg;image/jpg;image/png

You can find plenty of samples for the Sendto menu from the Thunar Xfce Wiki page.

Media tags

One thing that is missing from the basic Thunar installation is the ability to edit media tags. I don’t know how many times I’ve been listening to a song on one device or another, only to have the media tag be wrong. To be able to edit these tags from within Thunar you need to install the thunar-media-tags-plugin. You can do that from either your Add/Remove Software tool (search for “thunar” – no quotes – and you will find it), or you can install it from command line like so:

sudo apt-get install thunar-media-tags-plugin

No matter which way you start it, restart Thunar once it is installed.

Now when you navigate to a media file, right-click the file, and select Properties you will find a new tab called Audio or Video, depending upon the type of media file you are viewing.

Figure 1

When you click on the Audio (or Video) tab you will see the all too familiar  media tags associated with that file (see Figure 1). At this point you can edit the tags to your hearts’ desire. Just make sure, once you are finished editing, that you click the Save button to complete the process.

You can also get a bit more information (un-editable information) about the media file by clicking Properties. This button will show you the file size, bitrate, samplerate, channels, and length of the media file.

Final thoughts

Thunar is one of the more customizable file managers available. Add to that the speed at which it runs, and the availability it offers to nearly all Linux desktops and you should see why it has become my favorite file manager.

Send To Toys is a control panel applet for Windows that can be used to configure the send to context menu effectively and efficiently.

The program window is opened upon launch and accessible in the Windows control panel. Windows 7 users find it in the Appearance and Personalization category.

The application displays four tabs that divide the configuration options. The send to tab lists several preconfigured Send to items that have been added automatically, among them Skype, run, clipboard, mail recipient, documents folder or recycle bin.

It is possible to remove the links that are not needed by selecting them and clicking the Remove button.

New items are added by clicking on the Add button and selecting a drive, folder or program to send the selected data to.

The open folder link opens the sendto folder in Windows saving the user the hassle to type in shell:sendto in the run box.

The default folder can be configured in the Folder tab. Several options are available in this window including the last used folder and a custom folder specified by the user.

Further options include to open the target folder on completion of the send to command, move instead of copy, disable recent folders history and to resolve shortcuts.

The Clipboard tab contains several configuration options that are useful when items are send to the Windows clipboard. It is here possible to wrap files names in quotes or other chars when they contain spaces, include the complete path, keep file names on separate lines, sort file names and several more.

The last tab can be used to configure the default mail recipient to send emails directly to that email address.

Send To Toys is a useful little application for the Windows operating system. Windows users can download the program from the developer’s website.

Send To Toys is one of those softwares that is able to add and remove entries from the Send To menu to either add a missing application or remove unneeded entries that clutter the menu. Several new possibilities are added by Send To Toys including sending items to the command line, the quick launch bar, a default email recipient, default folders and to the clipboard.

If you use the send to folder option quite often you might find the option to open the destination after completing the operation quite useful. Send To Toys is nice to have if you use the Send To menu regularly.

Read More:

Send To Toys

You are free to create new folders, sub menus and separators and fill them with the content that FileMenu Tools offers. New options vary from the very useful Command Line From Here option which opens the command line window from the selected folder. You may also run a selected program with parameters (defrag or anti-virus for example) and perform many operations such as copy path, move to, advanced delete and advanced renamer.

Besides that you can edit the Send To dialog which I personally rarely use. You can disable current options and add new ones with ease. One application could be to move files to a special data folder once they have been downloaded and checked. There are certainly other and better options but this is just to show that adding new send to entries can be useful.