hobar-treasures

XFCE4 panel + GTK4 launcher for quick access to favorite files and directories with thumbnail previews.

A small two-piece system:

• plugin/libtreasure-panel.so — a GTK3 XFCE panel plugin that adds a button to your panel. On click it computes its on-screen position and spawns the launcher anchored to itself.
• treasure-panel — a GTK4 binary that reads a JSON manifest of your "treasures" (paths you care about) and renders them as a popup grid with thumbnails for images and icons for everything else. Clicking a directory expands it inline; clicking a file opens it via xdg-open.

The split is forced by reality: XFCE's panel is GTK3, but GTK4 is where the nice popup, picture rendering, and modern layout live. Two binaries, one pipe between them.

Build

Requirements:

• Rust (stable, 2021 edition)
• gcc, pkg-config
• Dev headers: libxfce4panel-2.0, gtk+-3.0 (plugin), gtk4 (launcher), gdk-pixbuf-2.0, libsystemd (for journald logging)
• just for the recipes (optional)

just build              # debug build of both pieces
just build-main-release build-plugin-release   # release

The build-plugin recipe bakes the absolute path of this checkout's launcher script into the plugin via TREASURE_PANEL_BIN, so the panel button knows where to find the GTK4 binary. If you move the source tree, re-run just build install.

Install

just install            # copies .so to /usr/lib/xfce4/panel/plugins, .desktop
                        # to /usr/share/xfce4/panel/plugins, restarts panel

Then add Treasure Panel to your panel via Panel Preferences -> Items -> Add.

To put a treasure-panel launcher on your $PATH:

just link               # default: $HOME/.local/bin/treasure-panel
TREASURE_BIN_DIR=/usr/local/bin just link

Configure

The manifest is plain JSON. Default location: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/treasure-panel/treasures.nu (a Nushell script that emits JSON to stdout) — but you can also feed a static JSON file with --manifest <path> or pipe one in on stdin.

{
  "title": "My Treasures",
  "thumbnail_size": 64,
  "columns": 4,
  "items": [
    { "path": "/home/me/Documents",  "name": "Documents",
      "kind": "directory", "section": "Directories",
      "expandable": true,  "icon": "folder-documents" },
    { "path": "/home/me/Pictures/screenshot.png", "name": "Screenshot",
      "kind": "image", "section": "Recent" }
  ]
}

Item fields:

• path (required) — absolute path to the file/directory.
• name — display label; defaults to the basename.
• kind — file | directory | image | video | audio | document. Auto-detected from MIME if omitted.
• expandable — directories only; show contents inline on click.
• icon — freedesktop icon name; overrides auto-detection.
• section — group header in the popup grid.
• children — pre-expanded directory contents.

Top-level fields: title, thumbnail_size (px, default 64), columns (0 = auto-fit).

The launcher caches the most recent manifest under $XDG_CACHE_HOME/treasure-panel/manifest.json for instant popup; pass --refresh-cache to rerun the nu script.

Logs

journalctl -t treasures -f          # GTK4 launcher
journalctl -t treasure-panel-plugin -f   # XFCE panel button
RUST_LOG=treasure_panel=debug treasure-panel --run-nu

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.