Thunar automatically switches focus when selecting a removable device on the left pane

[Saverio Miroddi]

When navigating the left pane with the keyboard, and selecting a removable device (or "Browse network"), Thunar automatically switches focus to the right pane. This makes keyboard navigation inconvenient, because one needs to switch back if passing over such entries.

This behavior is inconsistent in several ways:

1. regular entries (eg. folder bookmarks) don't perform this switch
2. when navigating quickly (eg. holding the down/up arrow key), this switch doesn't happen
3. other Nautilus clones don't perform this switch

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.10
Package: thunar 1.8.1-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.18.0-7.8-generic 4.18.5
Uname: Linux 4.18.0-7-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.10-0ubuntu11
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Fri Sep 28 16:03:57 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-09-28 (0 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" - Beta amd64 (20180927)
SourcePackage: thunar
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Theo Linkspfeifer (lastonestanding)]

This upstream report was marked as won't fix:

https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10122

[Theo Linkspfeifer (lastonestanding)]

I suggest that you open a new upstream bug report if you want the current Thunar developer to look into this.

[Saverio Miroddi (64kramsystem)]

> I suggest that you open a new upstream bug report if you want the current Thunar developer to look into this.

Thanks for looking into it, but I have another experience with poor keyboard-based UX in Thunar, and in the big picture, it's clear that the devs don't have any consideration at all of this usage.

They're certainly free to make their design decisions; I just think any effort is useless.

As a matter of fact, with the DE file manager being crucial, and Thunar so entrenched with XFCE and so bad for keyboard-only usage, that I had to move to another distribution/DE specifically because of this.

[Theo Linkspfeifer (lastonestanding)]

Closing this report then.