I use Thunar/Xfce on Siduction GNU/Linux (Debian unstable). I tried to create a international output (for another bug report) in english. But it is not possible. Thunar ignores $LANG. Calling Thunar like that: [bash] $ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 thunar [/bash] Open it i my systems default/main/primary language German. But I need it in English - just for that moment. It is a usual way to start software like that when providing informations for other develoopers (e.g. in a bug report). So Thunar should respect users wishes here.
This problem is still there and makes it hard to create good bug reports.
Make sure the Thunar daemon isn't running - all thunar instances will use it's LANG settings. thunar -q ...then: LANG=en_US.UTF-8 thunar
I didn't knew that Thunar need a deamon. What is the exact name of it? systemctl and ps -A doesn't find something like that.
Your "thunar -q" doesn't give any output. But it is working after it. thunar should use LANG primary if it is set and only in a secondary step it should ask its daemon.
The purpose of the daemon is to speed up Thunar initialization every time you open a window. As ToZ mentioned thunar -q asks the daemon to quit, and will not print any message, it's similar to pkill -i thunar. When the daemon starts, it passes LANG to gettext, which is responsible L10N. Further calls to Thunar just poke the running daemon to show a new window, gettext has already been initialized. Unfortunately what you ask is currently not possible or at least requires too much effort for little benefit IMHO. Why don't you just set the desired locale system-wide? The only time I set LANG when launching an app is when I need to check translations, in that case thunar -q && LANG=... thunar works well. Do you have another use case that is hindered by the current behavior?
I understand the process now. As I told in the beginning I use this LANG-thing to produce better bug reports. e.g. Debug-Output or screenshots should be English and not German. Now I know how to handle this. IMO the report can be closed now.
Ok then, closing...