Having desktop icons with Thunar on Arch Linux with Openbox

Question

I'm using Arch Linux with Openbox as my window manager. And Thunar as my preferred file manager. I'm using zsh in case that's relevant in any way.

How would I go about having desktop icons? I find it very useful to have my desktop with symlinks to all my frequently used folders and apps.

I tried searching Google but haven't been able to find anything about accomplishing this with only Thunar. Or some script that accomplishes just that.

Solution

There are some file managers that also manage the desktop icons, but Thunar is not one of them.

The Xfce desktop uses Xfdesktop to display the desktop icons, it depends on Thunar.

Alternatively you can use iDesk, which has no dependencies to any of the mayor desktop environments, but needs to be configured by hand.

Some of the file managers which can display desktop icons are

• Nautilus
• PCManFM
• Spacefm

All of them should work with Openbox.

Comments

[Admin]

Openbox is a WM, not a DE; there is no "desktop" as such. Use tint2 or another launcher...

[Admin]

@jasonwryan I am aware it's a WM and not a DE. I'm asking how I could get desktop icons on my "desktop", grabbing those icons from the ~/Dekstop folder. If it's simply not possible using Openbox as the WM and Thunar as the file manager. I've no problem, just thought it would be nice...

[Admin]

Thunar is irrelevant for this, and open-/fluxbox are around for people who don't want the clutter of desktop icons; so asking how to introduce them to these is kind of weird. Use XFCE instead ;D

[greduan]

Thanks for the answer! Sadly I don't use Openbox or Arch Linux anymore (I'm now stuck on a Mac). Whenever I switch to Linux again though I'll keep this in mind, thanks! :)