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Replacing thunar with ranger? (or how can I use ranger to manage external volumes/drives/media/USBs)

Hello.

I have been a tiling window manager user, and a termincentric user for a while but one of the apps where I preferred to stick yo a GUI option was the file manager. I decided to use Thunar because of the thunar-volman extension which allows me to easily access the files on my external drives and USBs. That is pretty much the primary purpose for my file manager. The reason I chose Thunar is because I’m trying to switch to Wayland full time and as such, I wanted my file manager to not require xwayland, and pcmanfm will either have to be used in xwayland, or I’ll have to find a way to theme QT apps as well, which I currently can’t be bothered to do. The thing is, I’ve been experiencing some issues with Thunar, more specifically super slow load times (around 20-30 seconds) when switching between X11 and wayland backends. Now, I suspect fhis is a part of a broader issue with either gtk apps or XFCE apps (I’ve noticed the same issue with ristretto image viewer), but I digress. So I’ve decided that a good solution might be to switch to ranger, as it is one of the easier file managers to get into and feels intuitive to me. My question is: How can I get ranger set up to fulfill my main purpose for it: accessing files on different storage volumes? Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Alternatively, if you know about any good GUI file managers with few dependencies, that are widely packaged, follow GTK theming and allow fpr easy external volume management, I’d be happy to consider them and try them out.

Thank you.

bledley ,
@bledley@lemmy.world avatar

maybe look into udiskie for automounting/unmounting your external drives. It notifies, ejects and powers them off nicely with a terminal command you could alias, script or keybind to something real simple. Then in ranger I have ‘gm’ set as shortcut to go to media. I don’t need the GUI file manager that often anymore.

bbbhltz ,
@bbbhltz@beehaw.org avatar

Not a Ranger user, but I think this is something it can do. You might have to look at some YT videos…

If I recall you can access automounted volumes with a keybinding like gi or gm.

Pcmanfm can be themed pretty quickly. Are you using pcmanfm-qt or pcmanfm?

eruchitanda ,
@eruchitanda@lemmy.world avatar

I use Ranger with mount script.

If you want the drives to be mounted automatically, add them to /etc/fstab

smoof ,

I add them to fstab so it shows up in Thunar/Dolphin unmounted. Then I believe I used to just run mount path in the terminal.

lungdart ,
@lungdart@lemmy.ca avatar

I use Ranger day to day and just access external volumes from their automatic mount points in /media, or I mount them manually to /mnt.

It works for me!

eceforge ,

It’s worth noting that the job of auto-mounting a removable drive is often hidden behind the popular file managers, if you want to do it without one you are probably looking for the “udiskie” application that does this in a more agonistic/generic sense. https://github.com/coldfix/udiskie. With that running in the background to automount, then you can just access the drives from their auto mountpoints in the default location of /run/media/username/drive_label

theshatterstone54 OP ,

Thanks, I will check it out.

grumpyrico ,

haha - nice … didn’t know udiskie but gets on my toolbelt list immediately … thx fellow-penguin

theshatterstone54 OP ,

Thank you, I will look into that. I think that’s exactly what I’m looking for.

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