No Nautilus Please

Thanks to Psychocats site, I have dumped my default file manager Nautilus and I am using Thunar. Thunar is a fast, clean, and easy to use Xfce File Manager. It is the default file manager in Xubuntu, but since I am using Gnome in Ubuntu, then by default I'm stuck with Nautilus. Originally, ubuntu forum member ciscosurfer started to discover a way to use this sleek file manager in gnome. Then, ultimately, psychocat made an easy-to-use script to do it.

1. Download the script to your Desktop
2. Paste the following commands in a Terminal:

cd ~/Desktop
chmod +x defaultthunar.sh
./defaultthunar.sh

To revert back to Nautilus, download this script to your Desktop and paste these commands in your Terminal:

cd ~/Desktop
chmod +x restorenautilus.sh
./restorenautilus.sh

I prefer this over Nautilus any day. I have zoomed on my icons to make them larger and added more places/folders to the side pane. You can also configure custom actions via Edit menu. In Custom Actions I have added a right-click 'open as root' (like Nautilus) by adding the command gksudo thunar. There are also plugins you can download for Thunar. I am using the Archive-Plugin. This gives you the right-click 'Extract Here' option for archives or the 'Create Archive' for files and folders. I had to compile this plugin from source and I posted instructions on how to do this on the ubuntu forums here.

I used the install instructions from http://foo-projects.org/~benny/projects/thunar-archive-plugin/index.html

• Download the tarball from here.

• cd to the download directory, then copy the following in a Terminal:
  

tar xvzf thunar-*

• cd to thunar-archive-plugin-0.2.4 directory that the tarball creates and install some dependencies first or it will complain later:

sudo apt-get install libthunar-vfs-1-dev

• then still in thunar-archive-plugin-0.2.4 directory:

./configure --prefix=/usr/lib/thunarx-1
make
makeinstall

• now check in usr/lib/thunarx-1 and make sure two files are in that directory
  thunar-archive-plugin.so and thunar-archive-plugin.la
  
  (If not they are probably in the newly created /lib/thunarx-1 directory....which would be:
  /usr/lib/thunarx-1/lib/thunarx-1)
  if they are copy the 2 files to /usr/lib/thunarx-1
  
• Restart thunar and you will have the "extract here" and "create archive" on right-click menu