Thunar's rename functionality is really nice. I'd like to use it with (hard/soft) linking and while at it, it would make sense to also have it for copy functionality. I imagine a set of radio buttons in today's rename window with options - rename / move - copy - hardlink (when appropriate) - softlink thanks for XFCE!
Thanks for reporting, and sorry for the late reply .. that functionallity already exists. Check the "edit" menu .. there is "duplicate" and "create link"(softlink). Support for hardlinks was already requested here: Bug #15401 I would not want to add any radio buttons to the "rename" window. That's not where you would expect such a feature.
I think there's a misunderstanding: there's actually two rename functions in thunar. The basic one when you have one item selected, the advanced one when you have at least two selected. This enhancement refers to the advanced one. The advanced one has the options to: - Insert Datetime - replace at position - enumerate - delete positions - search and replace including regex - converting case I could emulate that by duplicate / link and then rename, but it's cumbersome. Also I completely agree that these operations under "rename" don't make sense. But rename could be part of an advanced file operations function where users can choose the operation: - rename & move (`mv` in sh) - copy (`cp` in sh) - (soft)link (`ln -s` in sh) - hardlink (`ln` in sh) together with the destination name with the same options as the advanced rename that exists today, with the destination naming options as in advanced rename / first list.
If you rename multiple files, the "bulk renamer" will be used. You already can copy/create_link multiple files from within the edit menu .. I dont think we should add more complex stuff there for tools which anyhow only will be used seldom, by a small fraction of people. Already now the codebase of thunar is huge, and very time-consuming to maintain. If you need advanced move/copy/renaming tools, you could create a thunar custom action: (edit --> user custom actions) Check the thunar docs for examples: https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/custom-actions You might want to use "zenity" in order to ask for filenames. If you have some nice script/command doing so, we could add it to the Wiki section.