Solved Thunar not saving preferences

jbo@

Developer
I wanted to give x11-fm/thunar a try.

While the basic stuff seems to work, editing preferences ( Edit -> Preferences) seems to have no effect. When I re-open the preferences window, prior changes such as the default view, date format and so on are all reverted to the default values.
It doesn't matter whether I do this in the same thunar instance or a new one. Preferences seem to be not stored.

Incidentally, there is no "save" or "done" button in the preferences menu. There is only the top righ-hand corner "x" and a "close" button at the bottom right.
After modifying preferences, I tried either buttons but neither of them seems to actually save the preferences.

Does anybody else have this issue? Am I missing something obvious here?
 
I don't use thunar so this is purely looking into a magic crystal ball.

I guess there are wrong file permissions / ownership for its config file.
Check the .config directory in your $HOME.
 
-rw-r--r-- ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/thunar.xml

I use thunar and have not come across your problem.

You might try closing all instances and running the preferences from the xfce settings.
 
Thank you for your replies.

In case this matters: I am running i3, not xfce4. If anybody can recommend a different/better-suited file explorer I'm all ears.
As such, I also don' t have xfce settings available.

jbo@fbsd_beefy01 /u/h/jbo> ls -l ~/.config | grep -i thunar
drwx------ 2 jbo jbo 4 Sep 27 19:04 Thunar


jbo@fbsd_beefy01 /u/h/jbo> ls -l ~/.config/Thunar
total 9
-rw-r--r-- 1 jbo jbo 6100 Oct 13 14:58 accels.scm
-rw------- 1 jbo jbo 381 Sep 27 19:04 uca.xml


When trying to modify the preferences, I started thunar as user jbo.
 
Try starting x11-fm/thunar from a X terminal, look if it does print some messages which might point to the problem.

I've encountered the same problem when using Thunar. After upgrading packages some time ago it wouldn't save preferences. I think there was some service missing but I don't remember which one, and I can't check right now, being away from the system running it. As alternative I have x11-fm/pcmanfm-qt installed, but I like the build-in batch renaming of files in Thunar.
 
Try starting x11-fm/thunar from a X terminal, look if it does print some messages which might point to the problem.
Duuh... not sure why I didn't come up with that idea myself...
Anyway, here we go:

Code:
jbo@fbsd_beefy01 /u/h/jbo> thunar
thunar: Failed to initialize Xfconf: Cannot spawn a message bus without a machine-id: Unable to load /var/lib/dbus/machine-id or /etc/machine-id: Failed to open file ?/var/lib/dbus/machine-id?: No such file or directory


(thunar:20852): Gtk-WARNING **: 17:16:00.241: Unknown key gtk-applications-prefer-dark-theme in /home/jbo/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini

(thunar:20852): thunar-WARNING **: 17:16:00.299: Name 'org.xfce.FileManager' lost on the message dbus.

(thunar:20852): thunar-WARNING **: 17:16:00.299: Name 'org.freedesktop.FileManager1' lost on the message dbus.
ThunarThumbnailer: failed to create proxy: Cannot spawn a message bus without a machine-id: Unable to load /var/lib/dbus/machine-id or /etc/machine-id: Failed to open file “/var/lib/dbus/machine-id”: No such file or directory

After that no other messages are printed. Also not when I open the preferences editor dialog, change something in there and close it.

I mean changing preferences wouldn't require dbus, right?
 
… Preferences seem to be not stored. …

Whilst in icon view, I preferred text beside icons. Quit, started, my preference had been saved.

Code:
% pkg info -x thunar
thunar-4.16.10
thunar-archive-plugin-0.4.0_1
thunar-media-tags-plugin-0.3.0_1
thunar-vcs-plugin-0.2.0_2
% uname -KU
1400036 1400036
% freebsd-version -kru
14.0-CURRENT
14.0-CURRENT
14.0-CURRENT
% pkg -vv | grep url
    url             : "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:14:amd64/latest",
    url             : "https://alpha.pkgbase.live/current/FreeBSD:14:amd64/latest",
    url             : "file:///usr/local/poudriere/data/packages/main-default",
%

That doesn't help to tell what might be wrong in your case, sorry.

default view, date format and so on

In what type of file system are the files?
 
I have some bad news guys...

After starting dbus (via service dbus onestart) Thunar is now able to store preferences as expected.

I'm equally surprised and confused by the fact that dbus is needed for changing application preferences - from within the application itself.
Maybe it's time to reconsider my decision of not using dbus. I just don't see functionality provided by it that would be of interest to me. I like things simple. i3, no fancy full blown desktop.

Whilst in icon view, I preferred text beside icons. Quit, started, my preference had been saved.
grahamperrin Are you running dbus by any chance? And if so, would you feel willing to try closing all thunar instances, stopping dbus, firing up thunar and trying to change preferences?
 
BANG !

I wish I had not done that now. I do understand that I am not grahamperrin , I merely wanted to try it out and see what happens.

I stopped dbus. Half the applications disappeared, and the other half stopped working properly. Firefox was unaffected, but xfce suffered. I could not even log out.

Did not even try to see if thunar saved or not.
 
You need to run it once, and you don't need to add a dbus_enable="YES" entry.
After that you have a /var/lib/dbus/machine-id entry. That's all.
You're absolutely right on this. I stopped the dbus service and Thunar is now still perfectly capable of storing preferences.

Most likely there are other downsides on not running dbus as mentioned by eternal_noob.
 
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