GSoC 22: Adding features to Thunar file manager

Congratulations for landing a GSoC gig of course, that must be awesome. A project I worked on ages ago almost tried to apply, but all we got was the t-shirt. :)

My take on the ideas:

Undo/Redo sounds like a lot of work, at least if it is going to be integrated well and supported for many operations. Again I don't know Thunar, but I guess you're going to have to figure out if there is a command abstraction internally, and start storing a log of executed commands so that undo can compute the reverse action. I guess some commands ("delete" comes to mind) are really hard to undo without rather intricate changes such as inventing a trashcan and moving things there, and so on. It seems clever to start with this, it's a real heavy-weight.

File counts for folders sounds strange; if there's a size column I would of course assume it to show size for folders too, not a completely different thing like the number of contained objects. In gentoo there is an explicit command ("GetSize", if I remember correctly) that recursively computes the size of a directory, and replaces the on-disk inode-level size of the directory with that. It's explicit since it takes time (gentoo is not multi-threaded or async, so it will block) but on modern disks it will be very fast.

Picture-specific view sounds like a great idea, especially if it's possible to integrate it well so you don't have to re-implement a lot to get access to basic file management commands for that view.

The undo feature will be a really nice touch.