Apologies in advance for the lengthy question, but I thought I'd chuck in lots of detail rather than wait until someone has to ask for it.

I'm using Thunar 1.6.3 on Linux Mint 17.1 XFCE on several computers on my home network. To avoid duplication I've got some of my home folders (Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos and Templates) on a network server that is mounted by each computer at boot time via a cifs-filetype entry in fstab as /mnt/srvr. I have a symlink in my home folder on each computer that links to the relevant folder on the server, so ~/Documents is a symlink to /mnt/srvr/documents, etc. That way if, for example, I create a new file template in one computer's Templates folder it is immediately accessible by any other computer in its own Templates folder.

I've been doing this for quite a while and it works very well except for one Thunar-related niggle. I have several file templates in the server's templates folder, and they show up without problem in the ~/Templates folder on each computer, but Thunar's 'Create Document' menu indicates 'No templates installed'. If I right-click on the XFCE desktop, however, the 'Create From Template' menu lists the templates correctly, so it seems to be a Thunar-specific problem.

I have found a workaround to get the templates to show up in the Thunar templates menu, by running a script at login that modifies the file ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs by changing the line to
and this works... except...

...when I do that Thunar fails to display the Templates folder with the usual folder-specific icon (it has specific icons for Documents, Downloads, etc) instead just using a generic folder icon. Yes, I know this is hardly a disaster, but over time it has increasingly irked me that I can't find a complete solution to this. Ideally I want Thunar to recognise the templates without having to do any workaround login script.

Is this just a Thunar bug, or is there some Thunar templates configuration issue I'm overlooking? And how does Thunar decide which folders get a folder-specific icon instead of the generic folder icon?

Perhaps you only need to update the time stamp of ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs upon first login with the touch command.

Thanks for the quick response. Wouldn't the time stamp be updated by the script that modifies the user-dirs.dirs file at each login?

It seems to be a bug in the Thunar code: http://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?pid=37872#p37872

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Rather than edit just update the time stamp without editing.