I was recently reminded of two Thunar features which are useful and not very well known.

First, Thunar comes by default with a fancy mouse gesture feature. The mouse gestures must be done with a middle click, if you don't have one, it can often be emulated by pressing the left and the right button at the same time. To perform a mouse gesture, press the middle button without releasing it, move the mouse in the direction required by the gesture and release the button. The following gestures are available:

  • Moving the mouse up moves to the parent directory of the current directory.
  • Moving the mouse down reloads the current folder.
  • Moving the mouse left moves to the previous directory in the browsing history.
  • Moving the mouse right moves to the next directory in the browsing history..

The second tip I recently discovered is that drag and dropping a file using the right mouse button opens a contextual menu which provides the following options: copy here, move here and link here. Link here is particularly cool, I used to launch a terminal and use ln... To use this right click drag and drop, you need to be faster than the traditional contextual menu: right click on the file/folder and start moving your mouse before the normal contextual pops up; once you release your mouse, the über-cool context menu will pop up.