Enabling “Show in System Explorer” in Eclipse on Linux

On my Gentoo 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. It mentions only Gnome’s Nautilus implementing the dbus interface - but I do not use Gnome, I use XFCE. Some more searching finds a ticket on the XFCE bugtracker 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 for dbus and the tutorial 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.