GSoC 2022 Brings New Features to Thunar, Screenshooter in Xfce Desktop

New features were implemented as part of GSoC 2022 in Xfce applications and are now merged into the main branch.

Google summer of code (GSoC) 2022 is a yearly competition which is about improving open-source projects. Thousands of students develop contributions while enhancing their skills and eventually benefit from open-source projects.

This year’s GSoC final project submission will be completed on September 12, 2022. And we have some updates on the Xfce desktop’s native apps.

Updates from GSoC 2022 for Xfce

Thunar Bulk renamer improvements

Historically, Thunar had the bulk file rename feature. But it had some errors for exceptional cases. For example, the bulk renamer used to fail when the new file name of the first file matches with the second file and so on. Since the second file is yet to be read and processed, this error seems valid but not okay from a user standpoint.

This situation is now solved via several iterations of the target files, which use sorting order (user, ascending and descending). The fix for this change is merged now to the Thunar main branch.

Read details about this change in MR 267.

Updates on Screenshooter

The Xfce’s own screenshot utility gets one of the most desired features – custom action on the screenshot. Currently, xfce4-screenshooter only provides basic features such as – saving, opening the capture, uploading to Imgur and copying to the clipboard. The new feature takes advantage of Xfce’s custom action feature. A new dialog box lets you define your custom actions on what you want to do with the image. You may want to send it to someone via email, print it or open it via another editor, say GIMP.

Nonetheless, it’s one of the much-needed features which Screenshooter is lacking. It’s worth mentioning that popular screenshot apps such as KSnip, Spectacle, etc., all provide these features.

More details about this change are in MR 37.

In addition to the above two items, some additional features were supposed to arrive as part of GSoC. For example, displaying the count of contents of a folder in Thunar, undo-redo in Thunar and enabling user profile in XFCE Terminal.

But there is no update so far on these items.

Wrapping Up

All merged codes from GSoC 2022 for Xfce should arrive in Xfce 4.17.4 (development) release and eventually will be in 4.18 stable. The last major Xfce release was 4.16, almost two years back. Since the team is small, combining all the changes might take some time.

Hopefully, we can get a stable Xfce 4.18 next year.

Via Yogesh Kaushik’s blog post-1,post-2.

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