GSoC 22 – The First Blog Post
I’m really looking forward to this summer, since my project proposal for this year’s Google Summer of Code has been selected! I’ll be working on adding features to Thunar file manager, an XFCE application, with the help of my mentor Alexander Schwinn.
My history with XFCE
I’ve been big on open-source ever since my school days, and actually ran Xubuntu (an Ubuntu distribution with XFCE as its desktop environment) on my daily driver, an old netbook back in eleventh grade. It was too slow of a device to run GNOME, so I absolutely had to use a lighter-weight desktop environment, and compared to alternatives like LXDE which I didn’t like the aesthetics of, and pantheon (the default DE for elementaryOS) which still felt lacking in terms of performance, XFCE was the perfect balance of form and functionality.
Since then, I’ve done some distro-hopping before settling on my current setup, hand-rolled with awesome window manager and no DE. While I generally prefer to use the command-line, Thunar has been by GUI file manager of choice ever since I started using this setup a little over 2 years ago. It’s fast, light-weight, and gets the job done without getting in your way, which is exactly what I need.
Planned features
Thunar does however lack a few features that would be really handy to have, which is exactly what I’ll be working on.
Undo-redo
Adding undo and redo is an absolute no-brainer for me, and would probably be the single biggest thing I think Thunar is currently missing. If you’re anything like me, you’ve often selected the wrong file to move into another directory, and you have to manually undo it and move the correct file once you realize your mistake. Implementing this would do away with such frustrating tedium in the case of minor mistakes.
File counts for folders
Currently, the list view in Thunar has a ‘size’ column which shows the size of the corresponding file in the listing. However, this column is blank for folders (or directories). As such, it’s essentially wasted space for directories, but it could be put to good use showing the count of the files in the folder instead.
Picture-specific maximized thumbnail view
Managing pictures is primarily based on the content of the picture itself, rather than metadata like the name, date etc. So it would be very convenient to have a specific view optimized for folders with a large number of pictures, where the thumbnails take up as much space on the screen as possible. Think Pinterest, Google images etc.
If somehow I complete the work enlisted in my proposal ahead of time, I plan on looking at some of the file system synchronisation bugs that some Thunar users have reported.
Conclusion
I’m glad to have the opportunity to be able to work on open-source tools I myself use everyday, and feel really lucky to have the support of Google to be able to work on this over this summer. I’m really grateful for the help I’ve gotten along the way to getting my proposal accepted from Sergios Kefalidis, Alexander Schwinn, and other members of the XFCE community.
I’d like to congratulate my fellow XFCE GSoC contributors Yogesh Kaushik and Amrit Borah as well (who coincidentally are also from different IIITs :grin:).
GSoC’22: The Journey Begins
I am pleased to inform you that my proposal for GSoC with Xfce, under the mentorship of André Miranda, has been accepted. So this summer, I will be contributing to Xfce. Allow me to introduce myself and the work that I will be doing.
I am Yogesh Kaushik, a sophomore at IIIT Delhi in the Computer Science Engineering branch. As per the suggestions of a few intelligent souls in my college, I dual-booted my system and began using Linux for regular use in my first semester of college. My first Linux distribution was Kali, and that's how I was introduced to Xfce. Over time, I also tried quite a few other desktop environments like KDE and GNOME. But for me, the simplicity of Xfce is simply unmatched. So when I got the opportunity to contribute to it, I can't refuse it. Luckily the opportunity didn't turn me down. Enough of my introduction; let me now tell you about my objectives for GSoC this year.
Thunar Bulk Renamer
Thunar is the file manager for Xfce. It comes with fascinating support for renaming multiple files, and that feature is called Bulk Renamer. The Bulk Renamer itself is a very advanced feature, but it may require unnecessary human intervention under some circumstances. If the user wants to rename a file, such that the new name is the original name of some other file, which is yet to be renamed, the system will require user interference. For more clarity, let's say the user wants to rename a file as "File02", but there is already a file named "File02," which is already added to the Bulk Renamer but is yet to be renamed. In such a situation, the Bulk Renamer will raise an error and ask the user to fix it manually. My task would be to make the Bulk Renamer intelligent enough to identify such situations and allow it to act independently in such cases.
This would be my first task in GSoC, so how I am going to do that, you will see quite soon.
Screenshooter
As the name suggests, it is an application to take screenshots in Xfce. The application is exceptionally rich in terms of the functionalities it currently has. And my task would be to make it even more prosperous. I would introduce the support for custom actions in the Screenshooter. For those of you who would have used Xfce a lot, you must have seen the custom actions in Thunar or AppFinder. For those who don't know it, allow me to elaborate. With the help of custom actions, the user will be able to run custom scripts for the taken screenshot. So if you want to directly upload your screenshot to your favorite hosting platform, you just need to create one script, and that's it; you are good to go. Similarly, you can do a lot more with it.
Panel
Xfce Panel is where you can find your open apps and a lot of widgets. Depending upon your Linux Distro, you can find it on any four sides. Generally, for Kali, it is present on the top. But you can customize it according to your own choices. Now panel has a lot of plugin, some of which are internal and some are external. My task would be to merge two such plugins, namely "DateTime" and "Clock". The two plugins are very similar and thus they should be merged for better developments in future.
If the time permits I will do a few more enhancements in the Xfce environment. My journey with Xfce has started and I hope it will go smoothly even beyond the scope of GSoC.
Congratulations to fellow Xfce GSoC contributors Pratyaksh Gautam and Amrit Borah.
A Journey Begins (GSoC – 2022)
Introduction
Hello 👋😁 ! I am overjoyed to announce that my proposal to XFCE for GSoC - 2022 got selected !
Oh ! I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Amrit Borah and I am a somophore undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Information Technology Guwahati (IIITG), India, pursuing Computer Science Engineering (CSE). I have only recently completed my 4th semester at college.
Tasks in my proposal
So, getting back to the topic at hand - GSoC, I will be taking on 4 tasks for XFCE.
Namely,
- Implementing option to enable expansion of folders in "Details View" in Thunar. (link)The desired outcome -
- Adding user profiles to XFCE Terminal (link)
- I'll also be rewriting the preference-dialog in plain C. Currently it has been written using glade.
Further details on the topics can be found on the links corresponding to the respective tasks.
What I'll be working with -
I will be working with GTK - 3.0 toolkit and C source code for the aforementioned tasks.
Linux, C & XFCE
I first started using Linux back in 2018. Quite frankly, I hated the look of Windows 10. I wasn't really tech savvy enough to really know the fundamental differences between Windows & GNU/Linux. All I could differentiate them by, was their looks. I wanted to make my desktop look and feel like MacOS. I have always liked it's pleasant looks. The MacOS desktop is pure eye candy to me. But unfortunately I never had the pleasure to own a Apple Mac. So I installed Ubuntu. Followed youtube tutorials and customised gnome to look like mac os. Then as year went by I tried out other distros like Pop OS, Opensuse, etc. But the laptop I had then was the Y530 from Lenovo which had Nvidia GTX 1050. Gaming was an issue for me. So I switched back to Windows.
Finally in 2020, when I got my own personal laptop for college, I got a thinkpad E14 with the intention of daily driving Linux. I tried out a variety of flavors on that hardware. It had great keyboard ! On the quest for the perfect Distro, I stumbled upon numerous YouTube channels on Linux notably DistroTube. Following the guide for Arch installation I successfully installed arch and tasted my first WM i.e Awesome WM. Customising it wasn't too bad but since I had little knowledge of lua I found it's config too verbose and hard to hack into ( (whispering...) I wasn't tech savvy back then ) . It was only a matter of time before I started WM hopping much like my distro hoping earlier. Tried out bspwm & xmonad. I even tried learning Haskell, but only went as far as the basics (didn't venture into monads).
But I think I finally settled down on Fedora. Gnome is/was my favourite DE but I always had one gripe i.e stuttering/lagging when switching into the overview view using intel igpus. It has now been solved ig with Gnome 42, at least it's really smooth for me now. So (I sincerely hope ! distro/wm hopping is fun but tedious 😭) Gnome it is then.
Coming onto C now, my first introduction to C programming language was in my CS course. It was one of the topics in my 1st semester. I kinda like C to be honest. I am most familiar with it's syntax more so than other programming languages. But memory management is not fun 😭. Oh the seg faults 😇 ! Later we did have Java as a course. I have a good relation with Java. But the real meaty portions of the OS was taught in my Operating Systems course in 4th sem. I loved that course.Finally got a formal introduction to the depths of an operating system.
I hadn't used XFCE on any of my main machines since they were quite capable hardware. It's only when I bought a raspberry pi 4, I got the taste of the XFCE DE. I am quite impressed with the performant and snappy look and feel of the DE. And Now I have the pleasure to work for XFCE 😄 !
Final thoughts
I have gone on for too long now. So keeping it short, I am really greatful for the opportunity that I am provided with and I thank Sergios - Anestis Kefalidis (my mentor & maintainer of XFCE Terminal), Alexander Schwinn (maintainer of Thunar & xfce org admin for gsoc) & Yongha Hwang (Xfce Developer) for the reviews and support.
I would also like to congratulate my fellow GSoC contributors - Pratyaksh Gautam & Yogesh Kaushik - and wish them the best of luck !
Really excited ! 😁
My contributions to XFCE