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colapop

Member

Registered: 2025-12-13

Posts: 10

the hazards of thunar Undo

Does anyone have trouble with the undo feature in thunar?

I find that it does unexpected and sometimes unknown things but having a hard time articulating very specifically enough to make a report. As sometimes I don't know *what* it has done. There is not consistency.

The most general way to describe the issue, is that there is no way to predict *what* Undo will do. In other software, if you open a menu like Edit > and look at undo it will give a hint. Example in LibreOffice Writer: "Undo: Paste clipboard", "Undo: Apply attribute". Redo functions similarly.

- Go to directory /home/myuser/test/
- Create a file textfile.txt
- Right click on file and click "Move to trash"
- In the same or a new window, go to another location in the filesystem
- Edit > Undo
- This file is restored and there is a notification, "Undo performed: Trash operation was undone"

If it was a while ago when you deleted that file, you have *not way* to know what just happened.

What makes this much more confusing is that if thunar is unable to undo the previous action, it skips *without warning* to the last action it *can* undo.

- Go to directory /home/myuser/test/
- Create files textfile.txt and spreadsheet.csv
- Right click on textfile.txt and click "Move to trash"
- Right click on spreadsheet.csv and click "Delete"
- Undo
- textfile.txt is restored and there is a notification, "Undo performed: Trash operation was undone"

There is also a dialogue that pops up sometimes when using Redo (for a trash action) that asks if I want to permanently delete the selected file. But then it does not delete the file, it restores it (as intended). I see it often, but I can't figure out the steps to reproduce it.

My examples above are on simple, empty files. For further complexity, consider many large files, so operations take a while to complete. You can Stop those operations mid-way. If Undo encounters one of those actions (either because you try to undo it intentionally, or because you try to undo something else that can't be undone so it goes back to this one) then you can get into a big mess.

It has happened to me that I know I have done *something* unintentional via Undo but I don't know *what* and am only able to try to guess using complex "find" with atime etc in the command line if can guess at least where in the filesystem it might have been. Redo itself has some weird behaviors I can't quite put my finger on but is not always able to get me out of an erroneous Undo.

Am I the only one who encounters this?

I am on thunar-devel (4.21.3 via aur) but this isn't version-specific. I have an older debian stable machine and run into same problems.