About
The Thunar Archive Plugin allows you to create and extract archive files using the file context menus in the Thunar file manager. For example, to create a new archive, just right click on the files and folders you want to add to the archive, right click on one of the selected files and select Create Archive... from the context menu.
This will open a dialog, which prompts you to enter the name of the archive file and the location where to store the created file to.
Likewise you can easily extract archive files using the context menu. Just select the archive file you want to extract, right click to open the context menu and select Extract Here.
The files from the selected archive will afterwards be extracted to the current folder. If you select Extract To... instead, you will be prompted to specify the location where to extract the archive to.
The Thunar Archive Plugin - since 0.2.0 - provides a generic scripting interface for archive managers, so basicly every archive manager that supports the required command line switches (or an equivalent D-BUS interface) can be used with Thunar. See the README file in the source distribution for further details about the process of adding a new archive manager.
The standard MIME association mechanism is used to determine the preferred archive manager for the Create Archive..., Extract Here and Extract To... actions. However the plugin may not always be able to detect the appropriate archive manager for a certain task. Then the user will need to manually select the preferred archive manager from a list of possible applications.
The Thunar Archive Plugin currently includes support for File Roller and Ark, but support for other archive managers can easily added by installing a .tap wrapper script in addition to the .desktop file for that application (see the README file in the source tarball).
Installation
Requirements
You will need atleast the following software packages in order to install and use the Thunar Archive Plugin:
Stable releases
Source tarballs and binary packages of the latest stable release 0.2.4 (and earlier releases) are available from the Xfce Goodies download page.
Getting the source from SVN
The Thunar Archive Plugin - just like the other Xfce Goodies - is available from the Xfce Goodies SVN repository, which means that you will need to install a Subversion client in order to be able to check out from the SVN repository (you can use the web interface for browsing the repository).
You can download the latest version of thunar-archive-plugin
using the
following command:
svn co http://svn.xfce.org/svn/goodies/thunar-archive-plugin/trunk \ thunar-archive-plugin
This will create a new directory thunar-archive-plugin
in the current
path, which contains the latest version from the repository.
Building and installing
If you downloaded a release tarball, you can simply run
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
now. The prefix must be the same prefix where Thunar is installed. You can find out the prefix using the following command:
pkg-config --variable prefix thunarx-1
Else if you use a SVN snapshot, you need to run
sh autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local
instead, because the automatically generated files are not included in the repository.
If the configure
script complains about missing
thunarx-1
package and you are using a binary
package for Thunar, be sure to install the appropriate
-devel
package (i.e. for Debian/Ubuntu it is
libthunar-vfs-1-dev
). Next, you continue with
make make install
where the install
step must be done with
superuser privilegues. That's all, now you just need
to restart Thunar in order to be able to use the
plugin.
Reporting Bugs
Bugs should be reported to the Xfce
bug tracking system (product Thunar Plugins
, component
thunar-archive-plugin
). You will need to create an account
for yourself.
Related Links
Latest News
thunar-archive-plugin 0.2.4 released20 Jan 07
This release brings new and updated translations. See the release notes for details.
thunar-archive-plugin 0.2.2 released4 Nov 06
Another minor release, which supports the new Drag'n'Drop context menu in Thunar 0.5.0 and brings new tangoified icons. See the release notes for details.
thunar-archive-plugin 0.2.0 released4 Jul 06
This release introduces a generic scripting interface for archivers, so the plugin can now be used with virtually every archive manager that supports the required command line parameters. Support for File Roller and Ark is builtin. Xarchiver will include support for the archive plugin in the next release. See the release notes for details.
thunar-archive-plugin 0.1.2 released17 Apr 06
This is a minor release, which fixes the problem that the folder was not properly reloaded after extracting or creating an archive, and contains a bunch of new translations. See the release notes for details.
thunar-archive-plugin 0.1.0 released26 Mar 06
The very first version of the thunar-archive-plugin
was released
to the public today.