Thunar sort order

For many years I have run Debian with xfce4 desktop.

I have always hated the way Thunar sorts files by name. The developers would say it is not a Thunar issue but rather a Gtk issue. But I really don't care. I hate it whatever the root cause. It is made worse by the fact that there is absolutely no configuration possible other than collation options (LC_ALL and LC_COLLATE) but these don't fix the problem.

So, today I dug in to fix it.

I tried several other file browsers, but they all have slight variations of the same nonsense and I didn't find any that sort file names sensibly (e.g. like ls does).

There are many bug reports against Thunar, Nautilus and several others, reporting that available sorting options are not satisfying.

There are so many, it makes me wonder why there isn't a simple plug-in option, to separate sorting from other aspects of the file browser, allowing people to easily develop the sorting algorithm they need. Gtk could provide this but so could the various file browsers. It seems all I investigated in any detail delegate sorting to Gtk and refuse to add any features to work around its limitations and stupidity (i.e. 'natural' sorting).

I read many bug reports and posts, with the conclusion that there is no configuration option to fix it.

I tried building Thunar from source, thinking I would hack on it to fix the sorting or add an interface to an external sort implementation, but there were too many dependencies and I got tired of installing them.

But in reading through all the bug reports, I came across GlibSortFileNameHackLibrary so I gave it a try. I cloned the repo and tried to build it.

On Debian Bookworm, despite having built various other packages, I still had to install libglib2.0-dev:

$ sudo apt install libglib2.0-dev

Then:

$ make all

This terminates with an error compiling test.c, but that's only a test program. The library builds OK.

Then, from a command window:

$ thunar -q; LD_PRELOAD=./glibSortFileNameHack.so thunar

This launched a new Thunar instance and files were sorted sensibly (as opposed to the Gtk idea of 'naturally'). It was wonderful! Finally, I can find files in Thunar without wasting time scrolling up and down to try to figure out where they have been misplaced.

I couldn't find trace of a Thunar background process running after I logged in (i.e. ps -ef showed nothing with 'thunar' in the command line). So I guessed there isn't one and didn't worry about why.

I use Whisker menu but don't really know how to configure it. When I tried prefixing the command for the file browser launcher with LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/glibSortFileNameHack.so, I got an error that LD_PRELOAD isn't executable. 

So, I made a bash script:

#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/home/ian/lib/glibSortFileNameHack.so thunar

And I changed the launcher to run the script.

This seems to work fine. At least, I haven't noticed any problems yet.

Now every Thunar instance sorts files sensibly.

Kudos to Alexandre Richonnier for publishing GlibSortFileNameHackLibrary. It hasn't been updated in 9 years, but it still works a treat!