I have i3 and some xfce4 packages installed in an Arch Linux installation. I mostly use i3 because I like how it, as a tiling manager, efficiently uses all of the monitor’s real state.

Something that I might forget in the future and was mildly annoying when I made the shift to i3, is making sure thunar (xfce4 file manager) had the option of Open Terminal Here and that it opened the right terminal. After a few minutes of googling, I figured out how to add the option.

Problem was that it was always opening xfce4-terminal, and not urvxt terminal which is the terminal emulator I use for i3.

After digging in a bit, I discovered that the Open Terminal Here option is actually a custom action of thunar itself, that can be edited in Edit > Configure custom actions..., there you find the action Open Terminal Here After clicking edit I could see the command that is being executed. The funny thing is that it didn’t execute xfce4-terminal. Instead it runs exo-open.

That’s how I learned that exo-open is a shell command that is comes with the exo package, and allows you open urls and launch preferred applications in xfce4.

All I needed to do then is to modify the preferred application for terminal emulator in xfce4-settings-manager, set urxvt and voila!

Last modified on 2018-03-22

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