XFce 4 Filemanager

Currently there are seven different types of root level branch types:

The following table lists the filemanager operations and their availability.

Legend:

T=toolbar

M=main menu

P=popup menu (button 3)

K=keyboard access

D=drag and drop

X=X pasteboard

C=doubleclick

* loses mountpoint status

** loses trashed status

The following table lists the filemanager commands and their availability.

* applies to selected branch only

If you wish to enable a certain configuration of which branches are shown and which are not when xffm is invoked as xffm, you must use the XFce4 Settings Manager (packaged separately) to set the environment variables on the fly. Set any of the following environment variables:

This will hide the respective branch. Don't worry if it's hidden, you can always activate any branch on demand with the main menu in xffm. You can also set other options:

If you like cute icons, xffm has several sets to choose from. Most of them are available from a separate xffm-icons package.

And you can also choose no_icons if you're not an icon guy or gal.

Once upon a time, in a far away land, there was a prince who kept all the kingdom's important information in his computer. In this manner he helped the king and prepared for the day when he would inherit the throne. One day he inadvertedly erased an important file and was strucken aghast. But he quickly found the the file had not really been erased but moved to a wastebasket. This saved the day, but also made the prince bolder. He no longer worried about erasing important files, since they would appear in the wastebasket. This happened until the moment he realized he had erased several important files weeks earlier. He searched the wastebasket but could not find them, so he summoned all the wise men of the kingdom to help him.

After examining the computer disk, the wisest man met him with a dire face.

— We are very sorry, your majesty, but we cannot find the files in the wastebasket.

— Why not?

— Because all erased files are placed in the same wastebasket, and this causes older files with the same name to be overwritten.

The prince became very angry. He then commisioned the group of wise men to come up with a better formula for the wastebasket. The solution they came up with was as follows.

Instead of moving and copying files to the wastebasket, which may be a lengthy operation when the wastebasket is in a different device, a wastebasket would be created in every directory where needed. The contents of wastebasket files would be version controlled so that older files would not be overwritten by mistake. There would also be a general trashcan where pointers to all files could be collected, either automatically or on demand. This general trashcan would provide access to all wastebaskets, especially usefull to empty all of them with a single click. If not all wastebaskets required to be deleted, a selective trash collection could be performed. And if GNOME or KDE trash directories were encounted during such collection, their contents would also be databased. This would allow the prince to organise his computer trash. The prince was so happy with the idea that he paid a software team their weight in gold to create the code. Thus the xffm wastebasket scheme was born.

Some time later, the prince found that his directories, especially the trash can was excessively large and he still could not find what he was looking for. He again called in his wise men for an answer.

— The solution is simple, your majesty, — said one of the gray bearded wisemen —. The file manager must enable a filter box so that the displayed files can be reduced in number. In order to be of any real use, the filter must use regular expressions so that combinations such as c$|h$ would work. But the easy to remember shell expansions like *.c should also work.

The prince snapped his fingers and the software team set to work. Once the filter option was presented to the prince, the programmers also threw in the find option, which would allow the prince to filter the files according to content as well. He was so pleased that he knighted every one of the programmers.

Finally, the prince was dissappointed that most of the people in his kingdom where using a different computer system which was not as good as his. The wise men explained to him that intelligent people are always a minority, so the best software was used only by a minority.

— I still need to share files with these subjects. I want to see their network shared files.

— We shall instruct the programmers to use the samba suite in a transparent fashion, if so please your Majesty.

— If it is not ready by to-morrow, I shall have their heads lopped off!

And so, the xfsamba4 branch was to be included in the first release of xffm.