Hello.

I have been a tiling window manager user, and a termincentric user for a while but one of the apps where I preferred to stick yo a GUI option was the file manager. I decided to use Thunar because of the thunar-volman extension which allows me to easily access the files on my external drives and USBs. That is pretty much the primary purpose for my file manager. The reason I chose Thunar is because I’m trying to switch to Wayland full time and as such, I wanted my file manager to not require xwayland, and pcmanfm will either have to be used in xwayland, or I’ll have to find a way to theme QT apps as well, which I currently can’t be bothered to do. The thing is, I’ve been experiencing some issues with Thunar, more specifically super slow load times (around 20-30 seconds) when switching between X11 and wayland backends. Now, I suspect fhis is a part of a broader issue with either gtk apps or XFCE apps (I’ve noticed the same issue with ristretto image viewer), but I digress. So I’ve decided that a good solution might be to switch to ranger, as it is one of the easier file managers to get into and feels intuitive to me. My question is: How can I get ranger set up to fulfill my main purpose for it: accessing files on different storage volumes? Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Alternatively, if you know about any good GUI file managers with few dependencies, that are widely packaged, follow GTK theming and allow fpr easy external volume management, I’d be happy to consider them and try them out.

Thank you.