Title: Enabling "Show in System Explorer" in Eclipse on Linux
Date: 2016-02-10
Lang: en

![Show in System Explorer]({static}/images/EclipseShowInSystemExplorer.png)

On my [Gentoo](http://www.gentoo.org/) machine the "Show in System Explorer" menu item did not work on Eclipse. I kept getting this error message:

    Execution of 'dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.FileManager1 /org/freedesktop/FileManager1 org.freedesktop.FileManager1.ShowItems array:string:"file:/tmp/HelloWorld.java" string:""' failed with return code: 1

A quick search on the net found the [freedesktop File Manager DBus specification](http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/file-manager-interface/). It mentions only Gnome's Nautilus implementing the dbus interface - but I do not use Gnome, I use [XFCE](http://www.xfce.org/). Some more searching finds a [ticket on the XFCE bugtracker](https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12414) which confirms that Thunar, the XFCE file manager, does not support the file manager DBus interface yet.

Now I had some motivation to learn more about the dbus message bus. There are even [Python language bindings](https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-python/) for dbus and the [tutorial](https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-python/doc/tutorial.html) suggests that it should not be too hard to put together some glue code that exposes the freedesktop file manager interface and forwards all calls to Thunar.

The result is [up on github](https://github.com/dirk-olmes/dbus-file-manager).