Treat Thunar Bulk Rename as a separate application?
Bulk Rename currently behaves like a modal widget when you select multiple files and click "Rename" or press F2. That makes sense, and it's nice that it launches so fast.
But it also has a desktop entry, so you can launch it as if it's a separate application. When you do this, it launches as a Thunar window, and it's still "always on top" and closes when you press escape. If you launch Thunar Bulk Rename first and Thunar File Manager after, then the File Manager Window will be in focus, but behind the Bulk Rename window/widget. If you launch more Thunar File Manager windows they will also be behind Thunar Bulk Rename, but in focus.
If you use an application launcher with "Run or raise" behavior, this will first try to check if the app is running, and if it is, it will raise that app instead of launching it. So if you do this with Bulk Rename opened and you try to start Thunar File Manager, it will instead raise "Bulk Rename". This happens now with for example https://github.com/mkropat/jumpapp and also for Gnome's default app launcher.
I think the core of the issues is that Bulk Rename uses the same Window Manager class as Thunar File Manager. You can override this in GTK with gtk_window_set_wmclass
but it's deprecated since 3.22, and I think now you would have to use a different GApplication
instance instead? And also add the new ID as the StartupWMClass=
argument in the desktop entry to fix launchers with the "Run or raise" behavior (one of the reasons I'm here is that I'm maintaining one of them, and trying to implement this behavior).
I also think it should only be "always on top" and close when you press Esc if you opened it from a Thunar File Manager window.
I hope I got these details right and made a reasonable suggestion. Thank you for all the great work on Thunar. I've been happily using it for years. :)