The "Send To" Menu

Thunar includes a Send To menu, which provides possible targets where files and folders can be sent to. To access the Send To menu, choose File → Send To from the main menu, or right-click on a file or folder and choose Send To.

Send To Menu

By default, the Send To menu includes an entry named Desktop (Create Link) for all files and folders, which simply creates a link on the desktop for each selected file. In addition, if the Shortcuts Pane is active, the menu also includes an entry called Side Pane (Create Shortcut) for folders, which allows users to add new shortcuts to the side pane. Following these entries, Thunar lists the removable drives currently plugged into the computer. In the screenshot above, the Floppy Drive represents a possible target where files can be sent to. Note that the device is mounted automatically once selected from the Send To menu, so you do not need to manually mount it.

In addition Thunar also ships the thunar-sendto-email plugin, which adds the entry Mail Recipient to the menu, that opens the mail composer with the selected files attach to the new email. If the selection contains at least one folder, the selected items are added to a ZIP archive before attaching them to the email. Otherwise, if the selection contains multiple files, or a single file, which is larger than 200Kib, the user will be prompted whether to pack the files into a ZIP archive, and send the ZIP archive.

Like most other features of Thunar, the Send To menu can be easily extended by users and application developers with new targets, using standard desktop entry files. These files must be installed into one of the $XDG_DATA_DIRS/Thunar/sendto/ folders (see the XDG Base Directory Specification for details about the $XDG_DATA_DIRS variable).

The MimeType of the target .desktop specifies the types of files for which this action should be available in the Send To menu. For example, say you want to add entry for a Flickr uploader tool, then this entry should only show up if the selection contains JPEG files (other file formats are not supported by Flickr) and so you should add a line MimeType=image/jpeg;. If you do not specify any MimeType your entry will show up for all file types.

A complete example using the postr application is shown below:

# postr.desktop - Integrate postr into
#                 the "Send To" menu.
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
TryExec=postr
Exec=postr %F
Icon=postr
Name=Flickr
MimeType=image/jpeg;

If you install this file to ~/.local/share/Thunar/sendto/ (create the folder if it does not exist yet), the Send To menu for JPEG files will show the new entry Flickr, which can be used to upload JPEG images to Flickr.

The Thunar Project Wiki contains additional examples of useful targets for the Send To menu. Feel free to extend the Wiki page with new examples.