Use the File Manager Preferences dialog to customize Thunar settings to your liking. To open the preferences dialog, choose Edit → Preferences... from the menu bar.

The File Manager Preferences dialog is divided into four tabs with different options, each described in a separate section below. Basically you can set preferences in the following categories:

• The default view settings for the Main Area.
• The default settings for the Side Pane.
• The behavior of mouse clicks.
• Advanced features of the file manager.

Thunar also supports several so-called Hidden Options, which control advanced features of the file manager, but are not included in the preferences in order to keep the dialog simple.

You can specify a default view and select various sort and display options. You can also specify whether thumbnails should be displayed for file types that support them.

View Preferences

View new folders using:

Select the default view mode for folders. When you open a new window, you can specify that the Main Area display is set to Icons, Detailed List or Compact List, or you can have the new window use the Last Active View. Note: this setting only applies to opening folders in a new window. If you open them in a new tab, the view in the new tab will be the same as the active view in the original tab.

Show thumbnails

Select this option to show thumbnails of image files and other supported files. Choose the Local Files Only option if you find that displaying thumbnails is too slow on network drives. The file manager stores the thumbnail files for each folder in the hidden .thumbnails directory in the user's Home folder.

See the Tumbler plugins section if you want to extend the basic thumbnail functionality provided by Thunar with support for additional file types.

Sort folders before files

Select this option to list folders before files when you sort a folder.

Show file size in binary format

Display file sizes using the IEC binary prefix kibibyte, mebibyte and gibibyte format (KiB, MiB, GiB) instead of the more common decimal format of kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte (KB, MB, GB). In the binary format, 1 KiB = 1024 bytes whereas in the decimal format, 1 KB = 1000 bytes.

Icon View - Text beside icons

Select this option to place the captions for items in the icon view beside the icon rather than under the icon.

Date - Format

Choose your preferred date display format or provide a custom date string. The most common specifiers for a custom format are:

• %d day of month
• “%m month
• ”%Y year including century
• “%H hour
• ”%M minute
• “%S second

For a complete list, check the man pages of 'strftime'.

You can select display options for both modes of the Side Pane.

Side Pane Preferences

The Side Pane can display either a list of shortcuts for folders in your file system, which is the default, or a tree view. This tab allows you to select the size of the icons shown in both of those views. The choices range from 16×16 pixels to 256×256 pixels.

If you have customized any of your folder icons with emblems, you can also specify whether those emblems should be displayed in the Side Pane. This will not affect those emblems displaying in the Main Area. See the Properties section for how to assign emblems to folder icons.

Here you can specify how your mouse buttons behave when selecting or activating items.

Behavior Preferences

Single click to activate items

Select this option to perform the default action for an item when you single-click on the item. When single-click activation is enabled, pausing the mouse pointer over an item will automatically select the item after the chosen delay. This behavior may be useful when a single click activates items and you want only to select the item without activating it. You can disable this selection behavior by moving the slider to the left-most position.

Double click to activate items

Select this option to perform the default action for an item when you double-click on it and to select the item with a single click.

Tabs instead of new Windows

Open folders in new tabs on middle click

If your mouse has a middle button, you don't have to go to the menu or right-click on a folder to get the Open menu. You can use the middle button to open the folder in your choice of a new window or new tab.

Open new thunar instances as tabs

Whenever you launch thunar while an existing thunar window is already open, a new tab will be added to the existing thunar window instead opening a new window.

Context Menu

Show action to permanently delete files and folders

The context menu will show an additional entry to permanently delete files and folders

You can control advanced features of the file manager.

Advanced Preferences

Folder Permissions

Choose how Thunar responds when you attempt to apply new folder permissions:

• to just the selected folder
• to the folder and all of its contents
• to ask for your choice every time.

Volume Management

If the thunar-volman package is installed, you can enable the integrated volume manager by checking the Enable Volume Management box and then clicking the Configure link to bring up the Removable Drives and Media dialog. See the section called Using Removable Media for details about this feature.