Xfce Forum

bubblebobble

Member

From: Italy

Registered: 2012-02-08

Posts: 24

Icons: avoid the arrow for symbolic links

Hi,

Quite often I have to install XFCE on SSD+HDD disks where "/" is on SSD while on HDD I just have those big folders such as videos and downloads symbolic linked to my /home/user partition.

The drawback is that in Thunar and Nemo, linked folders are shown with the arrow in the bottom right corner which I don't like to see.

Is there any method to show the folder icon just as a normal one (without the arrow) ?

I tried to look for on startpage.com but I didn't get any relevant results.

Thank you in advance

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: Icons: avoid the arrow for symbolic links

There are two ways that this can be achieved:

1. Using "mount --bind" to bind the contents of one directory to another (no symbolic emblem will be used for these folders).

sudo mount --bind /media/DATA/Videos /home/toz/Videos

2. Remove the symbolic link emblem system-wide:
The icon responsible for that emblem is emblem-symbolic-link. Search your current icon theme for that icon (there may be multiple size instances). Change that icon to be a blank transparent icon of the same size (good idea to keep a copy of the original somewhere). Once complete, make sure you run:

sudo gtk-update-icon-cache /path/to/icon/theme/folder

...to update the icon cache. You may need to kill all thunar instances with:

thunar -q

...for it to take effect.

As an example, default Xubuntu 14.04, icon theme = elementary-xfce-darker that inherits the main elementary-xfce icon theme. elementary-xfce has emblems/48/emblem-symbolic-link.png (the only emblem-symbolic-link file in either the elementary-xfce-darker or elementary-xfce themes). I edited the file in gimp, removed everything leaving only the transparent background, and saved the file.
Ran "sudo gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/elementary-xfce" (also rebooted here, but not sure its necessary, maybe just "thunar -q" would work) and the link emblem was gone (or at least, transparent).

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bubblebobble

Member

From: Italy

Registered: 2012-02-08

Posts: 24

Re: Icons: avoid the arrow for symbolic links

Toz,

I was already thinking about the method#2 but found it as a not "professional" way to do it, anyway I have now learnt the bind mount which successfully solved my problem. In addition bind mounts can be used also in fstab so that I do not have to write any scripts for the mount at boot.

A big thank you!

BenyaminL

Member

Registered: 2019-10-11

Posts: 70

Website

Re: Icons: avoid the arrow for symbolic links

Sorry for hijacking old thread, I just want to add that we can use

sudo gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/*

This on all cache, so it will work accordingly, example we have ~/.icons/default, then this icon can only be indexed using that comand, even when we force using gtk-update-icon-cache ~/.icons/default -t -f -i, it will make no different, so....

Better use that for all/whole icon pack.

tested on Fedora 38 XFCE Spin