Distro hoping. I am trying out Mint 20 Xfce. And so far so good. I kind of like the feel and the layout of Xfce. I do miss something and it’s minor, but was wondering if the file editor Thunar 1.8.14 display can be modified.
What I got is “Name Size Type Date Modified” headers.
I would like to replace Size with the count of items in that folder the way Mint Cinnamon does. Once the folder is open then it shows the size of each item.
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i am so used to thumbnail view that i thought i should take a look at what you were talking about. it is clever the way nemo shows item count in cinnamon for directories but also size for files. i didn’t see a quick way to do so with thunar, so i ran a quick 
and found this fairly recent response to a similar question.
xfce has a nice bit of documentation, but i didn’t find anything as specific as what you are looking for. at the bottom of the thunar hidden settings page there is a short description about how to use css to make some changes that seem like they would be more visual than being able to change what information is presented. there is also a quick mention of gtk inspector at the very bottom. i enabled that in my mint 20 xfce vm and was able to find a setting for the name of that column, but that was as far as i got.
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Thanks for your research @01101111. The change does not sound easy. Just curious, in Xfce could I use Nemo as the editor or is that like changing the whole DE?
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what i have read is that it is ok to install and use another file manager, but is best to not uninstall the one that comes with the de. so i believe you could use nemo with xfce just fine. i installed it on my vm to take a look. nemo on the left and thunar on the right:
Thanks @01101111. That’s what I did.
sudo apt install nemo
Then a text file mark execute on the desktop. Text file:
#!/bin/bash
nemo
.....
This works great.
So now I have 2 file managers / editors. :smiley:
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nemo has been one of my favorite parts in the testing i have done with cinnamon. i read a little about nemo actions that let a user automate some repetitive tasks and even got to help troubleshoot one. i just saw today that thunar has something similar called custom actions. that’s way more than i thought could be done with a file manager or what i do with the one that comes with bodhi.
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I found this interesting so I will pass it along.
Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon running idle uses about 760 MB.
Linux Mint Xfce 20 …running idle uses about … 390 MB.
Cinnamon used almost twice as much memory sitting idle.
I did not like Thunar too much and was thinking of staying with Mint Cinnamon, but now with Nemo loaded in Xfce, I am thinking maybe doing a switch to Mint Xfce.
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i like lightweight de’s. that’s one reason i grabbed the xfce iso’s for testing and checking out mint 20.
back when i first started here and was still fairly new to linux and bodhi someone asked if a lightweight de limited the functionality of the underlying distro at all. i haven’t found that to be the case at all. i am not a power user by any means so that may something to do with it. i think installing some packages can cause de’s to run a little more memory at startup, but 3 or 4 years later my bodhi still loads at just about 400 mb before i start opening up my usual host of programs.
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I’m running nemo in XFCE on my RPi4 8 GB, mainly 'cause I don’t like Thunar, and I really kinda hate the default icon for it too, it looks lame… But as referenced by previous posters, just leave Thunar installed, but don’t use it or run it… in XFCE, go to “Preferred Applications” setting in Settings applet, and change your “File Manager” choice under “Utilities” (in my case, it doesn’t suggest nemo, so I just selected “other” and typed “nemo” ).
This is in XFCE 4.12, things are possibly different in later versions of 4.1x (like 4.14)…
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I also admire lightweight OS’s. I think it’s b/c (right or wrong) that they are more efficient
and b/c the less room they take up, the more storage for me to do my work. Maybe it also due to the fact that back when I was programming in Cobol in the 70’s and had only 32 KB of computer memory where every byte saved counted.
BINGO! I believe it was @Akito stated it very well on this board once and that all these Linux OS’s do the same thing. I must have install at least a half dozen Distro to play with (not a full test) and as far as I could see the screens, the DE’s and the menus were all different BUT, they all did the same thing! It was just were or how they did it. So what makes people do all this hoping? Is it the eye appeal, the layout of the menus, the screen backgrounds on the screen?
If you are happy with the Distro you have, there is really no reason to be hoping. I probably get a lot of disagreement, but that’s OK.
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Here the post in question:
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posted one whole minute later as if that link were just waiting for its memory to be invoked! 
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that’s pretty much my take as well. another part of it for me is the idea that if i can run just about anything i need on 4 gb of ram these days, hopefully my 8 gb system will be able to stick around for some time (barring any other hardware failure) as far as being comfortably useful goes.
when i first read cobol, my immediate reaction was “another person with refined enough taste to enjoy battlestar galactica!” 
then i kept reading. i kid 
somewhere i read a comparison between how much programmers could squeeze into the code of the tiny rom chips that ran early video games with what it takes to run a modern web page not including the browser. the raw efficiency involved in new innovations will probably almost always give way to some version of bloat when the hardware used to implement it becomes more and more accessible or inexpensive (or probably both).
there was a discussion in the bodhi forum recently about how the newest release for 32-bit systems no longer fits on a cd since it weighs in at a whopping 780 mb or so. of course that’s still fairly slim compared to some of the other legacy images out there (which are also diminishing in number), but slightly problematic since some of the older systems aren’t very friendly to usb booting.
it’s all pretty much just a gui wrapping on some shell or programming language command that lets me point and click instead of typing as far as i can tell. i agree that the eye appeal is probably a considerable part of it. no matter how hard i try ignore it, every time i test a distro with the taskbar (or panel or whatever that distro/de calls it) on the side of the screen (like ubuntu with gnome or mx), it just feels off.
i have also read some people who say distros like arch, gentoo or slackware give the user more control over what is installed or run by their systems by having them do so instead of automating as much as the more “beginner-friendly” distros like ubuntu or mint do, but some of that is still a bit beyond my skill set as well as not really what i want to spend my time tinkering with.
one of the other things i like about xfce (this was also true to some extent with antiX running icewm) is that the config files are fairly easy to understand. most are in xml format with something along the lines of setting=value and as long as a user knows or can figure out if that value is a string or boolean or whathaveyou, they don’t need any fancy gui settings program to make a quick change here or there.
i once disabled my touchpad in an xfce (don’t recall which distro) vm and it took me a little while to find it, but eventually i was able to change that 0 back to a 1 in a terminal and yay for being able to use the touchpad again.
well, i’ll disagree here just so you can be right 
i do like the fact that there are so many choices available. i was impressed again with mx when i was checking out a vm the other day, but not sure i would even want to switch entirely just now. i also keep thinking that i will try an LFS build one of these days just to see how the process goes.
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Nemo default view.
Is there an easy way to set Nemo default view to be List?
There are 3 views; Icon (default), List, and Compact.
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looks like you can set that in edit -> preferences. the very first setting is for “view new folders using:”.
i just discovered that for both mx and mint xfce, nemo shows up in the menu as just “Files”. if that didn’t happen to you, please feel free to ignore the following. i was able to change that fairly quickly so i thought i would share. i opened the desktop file with admin privileges to be able to save the changes. sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/nemo.desktop (or whatever text editor you prefer) opened it. the first line was “Name=Files” on both of mine. i just switched Nemo for Files and it showed up in the menu as such.
This was what I was looking for. Thanks for your help.
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