Hello and welcome to the first of a series of blog posts detailing my work in this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC from now on). Most of you have probably found this page from one of Xfce's development channels, but for those of you who just happened to stumble upon it let me say a few quick words about Xfce. Xfce is a FOSS desktop environment for Unix-like systems. It has a dedicated community of developers and users and it is one of the most widely available DEs. It also happens to be the desktop environment that my/our department uses for its Linux systems.
Allow me to introduce myself, which is also the main point of this blog post. I am Sergios - Anestis Kefalidis and I am a 3rd year undergraduate student at the department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. This is my second year in GSoC and my first time contributing to Xfce. I've made significant contributions to another high profile open source project, MuseScore with whom I also completed my first GSoC project as you might have guessed.
This summer I will work on improving Thunar, Xfce's file manager. File managers are one of the most used system programs and the Xfce project considers Thunar one of its core components. A good file manager positively impacts the user experience and allows the user to achieve his/her file managing tasks intuitively and quickly. Thunar is a pretty decent file manager that is unfortunately missing some features that other widely used file managers support. I am aiming to bring the parts of Thunar that are lagging behind up to par with the rest of its rock-solid components. I've already made a significant amount of contributions in the previous months that improve various parts of Thunar, most notably the Trash folder. The time has come for even bigger improvements.
In the first month of GSoC I have planned to work on 2 things. Support for the `Recent` location (as seen in Nautilus, Dolphin, Windows' File Explorer and others) and support for saving zoom levels as a per-directory setting. I've already started working on these 2 features and the early results are more than encouraging (you can see and test the latest implementations by visiting the Thunar gitlab). I'll talk more about these things in the following weeks.
In the second month of GSoC I will work on improving Thunar's search functionality which is bare-bones and on implementing a missing part of freedesktop.org's thumbnail spec. More on both of those in the coming weeks.
As an ending note, I want to congratulate my fellow GSoC students Yongha and Vishal and wish them good luck. I am looking forward to working with all of you on improving Xfce :^)