XFCE Default apps - How is everything so FAST?
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It's time we pushed forwards in our exploration of XFCE, this time, we're going to look at the default applications that this desktop ships, and reflect a little bit on their approach, that is really different from other desktop environments.
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## File Manager
Probably the most important app on a desktop is a good file manager. XFCE ships with Thunar, which is probably some kind of old Norse word to say Thor, the god of thunder, since the app's icon is a hammer.
Thunar is simple on the surface, kinda looking like Pantheon's file manager if somebody had grafted a menubar to it. It supports tabs, of course, lets you edit the location directly instead of using a weird keyboard shortcut to do so, and lets you use a breadcrumb style pathbar if you want to. The sidebar is your average fare, listing places, devices, and network, but you can switch that to a tree view if that's what you prefer.
View modes are pretty limited though, as you can only get an icon view, and a list view, or a more compact list view called "compact".
In terms of options, Thunar is pretty complete: you can move to single click, tweak the icon sizes for the side pane, or open new windows in tabs instead, among a lot of other available tweaks.
Thunar also comes with a bulk rename utility, which ships as a separate app instead of being directly implemented in the file manager, and it lets you, well, rename files in bulk. What did you expect?
## Terminal
Next is the terminal. XFCE's one is named Terminal, and I can only applaud the lack of custom name.
So, this app supports tabs, and lets you change how copy paste works, with direct copy, or using a dialog to inform you that pasting whatever command any idiot gives you on the internet, inside of your terminal, is a pretty bad idea.
You can change the fonts, the default number of lines and columns, use a transparent background, change the colors, and even select what will be picked up when you double click on something, so you can even tailor what text you're going to select. Pretty cool.
## Image viewer
XFCE uses an image viewer called Ristretto.
Ristretto is competent, it's no photo library manager, so it doesn't have editing capabilities, but it will let you open any image blazingly fast, set it as your default wallpaper, although that didn't work in my tests, or set a slideshow.
You also get a sidebar if you opened multiple images, and you can switch from one to the next easily, in short, it's a simple image viewer, nothing too special, and nothing lacking here.
## The Utilities
XFCE also ships a bunch of utilities, although some of these might have been added by Fedora instead. I mentioned previously that there was no file search in the menu, and that's because you have a dedicated utility for that, called catfish. It doesn't seem to have a specific keyboard shortcut attributed to it though, but it is lightning fast, although its GTK 3 nature doesn't seem to accord itself too well with the default theme, with menus not reponsing like they should on hover. Yeah, I know, I'm nitpicking.
You also get a basic task manager, with graphs for CPU and RAM usage, and a list of processes that you can kill without mercy.
It has a nice tool to let you identify which process is linked to a certain window, though, and that's pretty cool, I'm not sure I've seen that on other task managers.
Now there is also a really weird thing called XFDashboard, and I don't know if that's something XFCE ships by default or if that's something Fedora added, but it seems to be aiming to copy the GNOME 3 activities view. It feels like it's not ready yet, and I don't really know why XFCE would add that by default, as they have their own desktop metaphor that isn't GNOME, but hey, who am I to judge.
You also get the usual screenshot tool, really simple, a very basic notepad, that looks like, well, microsoft's notepad, a calculator whose name will make you sound like you have the flu, and a dictionary.
Finally, you also get XFBurn, which is a CD/DVD burner, and I won't spend too much time on this, because I don't have any CD or DVD drives that I could use to try that out.