PCmanFM misses the permission column in its detail view and the ability to set viewable columns. Because of this I switched to Thunar.
Now I want to set it as my default file manger in LXDE.
How to do this?
The quickest way is to create a pcmanfm shell script in /usr/local/bin. This shell script will instead execute thunar
Thus:
nano ~/pcmanfm
copy and paste the following:
#!/bin/sh
thunar $* &
Save
chmod 755 ~/pcmanfm
sudo mv ~/pcmanfm /usr/local/bin
The disadvantage though of this method is that you will lose any desktop shortcuts because on login, pcmanfm is no longer being run on login.
A more interesting method would be to have the LXDE shell but with the XFCE desktop rather than the pcmanfm desktop
The reason for running with the xfdesktop is that it integrates with thunar whereas the pcmanfm desktop cannot be configured to launch folders stored on the desktop with thunar - only pcmanfm.
The recipe is as follows:
/usr/share/applications/pcmanfm.desktop and change the line Exec=pcmanfm %U to Exec=thunar %Uleafpad change all references of pcmanfm to thunar in the file ~/.config/openbox/lubuntu-rc.xml/etc/xdg/lxsession/Lubuntu/autostart and change the line @pcmanfm --desktop --profile lubuntu to !@pcmanfm --desktop --profile lubuntu~/.config/autostartxfdesktop on login: create a file called xfdesktop.desktop in this autostart folder with...the contents
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Exec=xfdesktop
Icon=help-contents
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
Categories=Utility;X-XFCE;X-Xfce-Toplevel;
Name=xfdesktop
sudo apt-get install xfdesktop4If you don't want to run the xfdesktop - then follow the recipe above, but dont disable pcmanfm in /etc/xdg/lxsession/Lubuntu/autostart and you also dont need to autostart xfdesktop.
Obviously you are still left with the folder on desktop launching pcmanfm issue - but if you can live with this, this is a worthy compromise.
