Thunar - Sharing a performance tip

[advice1010]

Because some MX developers and moderators recently helped me, this put me in a little bit of a better mood with my experience with the forum, and because of this I decided I would share something that I learned about recently having to do with Thunar if anyone is interested.

MX 23.5
XFCE 4.20.x (for me this did not work in 4.18.x)

Not sure if anyone else will notice/care about this but
For a while I could not understand why in a DE such as XFCE, that does not really use animations/movements/scrolls with their software, why did Thunar seem be using many of them?
A command was mentioned to me to try, but it did not work when I tried this in XFCE 4.18.x
However, I then tried this out again when I updated to 4.20.x and was surprised that it does work.

Apparently these "animations" have no connection to Thunar, they apparently are due to some kind of gnome animation setting and can actually be turned off, with the following terminal command

Code: Select all

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false

by doing this Thunar then (at least to me) acts more of how I was expecting it to function, a lot snappier with no animations.

If anyone is interested give it try and let me know what you think.
If for any reason you do not like this it can be reversed back by entering this command instead

Code: Select all

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations true

Hopefully others will find this useful as well.
Also I will share some examples of "animations" I am speaking of in a reply below.

[advice1010]

-Most of these mainly occur when using "List View"
-Also your list of files must go beyond the bottom of your Thunar window where vertical scroll is needed to view them.

Animation Examples (before turning off this setting)
1.) If you bring your cursor/highlight to the bottom file and hit your down arrow, you might notice the cursor/highlight rectangle dip below view quickly and then slightly rises back up into view.

2.) If you put cursor highlight at top of file list and then hit page down, you might notice that the cursor will quickly advance to the bottom of screen and then animate/flash back up to show the highlight at the top of the list again. Kind of hard to explain in a short paragraph.

3.) Even when you use arrows, page up/down, home, end keys to navigate you can kind of see your files text get kind of blurry/movement while navigating.

There are more but I think this gives a little of an idea of what to look for.

[BV206]

Another way to change this setting is if you have dconf-editor installed you can search for "enable-animations" or navigate to /org/gnome/desktop/interface/enable-animations and switch it off.

[Duliwi]

I have not problems with performaces in thunar although I have "/org/gnome/desktop/interface/enable-animations" enabled. But I don't see any animations either. But I also do not need animations.