Chapter 8. Virtual File Systems

Table of Contents
The VFS Browser
The FTP Filesystem
The URL Filesystem
Multithreaded I/O

jEdit doesn't deal with disk files directly. Instead, it passes all buffer loading and saving through one of several available storage implementations known as virtual filesystems. The jEdit core includes local, FTP and URL filesystems. Plugins can be written to add more.

The VFS Browser

There are three ways to access the VFS browser. The Open File and Save As dialog boxes embed one. Utilities>File System Browser displays a standalone version. By default, the standalone VFS browser is shown in a separate frame, but if you prefer, you can set it to be docked into the current view in the Docking pane of the Utilities>Global Options. The browser consists of a tool bar, a path field, a filename filter field, and the file list itself.

The toolbar buttons perform the following actions, from left to right:

The More menu contains several less frequently-used commands:

The filter text field allows you to specify a subset of the current directory to display in the form of a glob pattern. See Appendix F for more information about glob patterns. Both the path and filter fields support a history; see Appendix B for details.

Right-clicking on a file in the VFS browser displays a popup menu, containing commands for manipulating that file, in addition to all the commands in the More menu. If the buffer is already open, the popup will have commands to display it in the current view, display it in a new view, or close it. Unopened file popups have items for opening, deleting and renaming. Note that not all virtual filesystems may support deletion and renaming (the local and FTP filesystems do). Attempting to delete a non-empty directory will give an error; only empty directories can be deleted.

Several aspects of the VFS browser can be customized in the Utilities>Global Options dialog box.

Figure 8-1. The stand-alone VFS Browser