I mostly use my laptop, and when I'm at home I like to be able to access the SMB shares on my NAS. While I can easily do so in Thunar (I use XFCE) by simply typing smb://nas.address/share into the address bar, no other applications are able to access the files on the share. For example, if I double click on a video file in my /movies share, I would like it to start playing in my preferred video player (VLC), but instead I am presented with an insane smattering of error messages and have to force quit VLC. I know I can set up permanent mounts via fstab, but 1) I want to be asked for the credentials when mounting rather than store them permanently on my computer and 2) since it's a laptop I will often be using it when I am outside of my local network and I do not want it to try to mount drives at boot which are not available (and no, I have no intention of opening up my SMB shares to the Internet). I'm tired of having to copy everything I want to watch/listen to onto my laptop via Thunar first - how do people deal with this nuisance?
Edit: This is what the authentication popup in Thunar looks like
Very promising indeed, exactly what one would expect to see - except that an authentication that is "remembered until you log out" only applies to Thunar and no other applications. As far as I can see, an smb:// path is just like any other URL, and with the credentials stored in my user session any application running in that session should be able to use those credentials to access the URL - provided of course that the OS has a registered handler for SMB URLs.