file manager changes
With the upcoming release of 4.1.90, changes to the xfce file manager are worth mentioning. Where to begin?
– The double treeview. In 4.0.x, this feature was a different view of the *same* treeview. Which is downright confusing. With 4.1.90, both treeviews are independent. Changes to one will not affect the other.
– The main menu. Now we have independent treeviews. To which treeview do the main menu functions apply? The old menu was confusing, so we have a new one. Actions which apply on a global scale are included in the main menu, those that are treeview specific are in the popup menu (except for the “goto” commands, which gray out when ambiguity is present).
– The applications branch. This branch was fun to program, but practically useless. Click: removed and replaced by a panel toolbar. The panel toolbar is useful if you are running the file manager on a remote machine (like a server), and you want a minimalistic remote xfce4-panel. Since remote server administration is rare, this option will not be compiled unless “–enable-panel” is specified during build (something server administrators know how to do). So don’t expect to see it unless you look real hard.
– The fork executor (Tubo). Select() replaced the equivalent glib function (which happened to be buggy). This allows a much faster response for all xfsamba functions, mount/unmount, find, tar creation and other commands.
– The copy/move routines were replaced by system defined cp/mv and run by Tubo. Thus, confusion is avoided by using the same default behaviour and error messages you would get by command line execution (plus, memory footprint is cut down).
– Other things that have changed significantly (I’ll explain these some other day): trash management, dropdown toolbar buttons, sidebar, column title popups, popup menus, sort methods, recent and frequent branches, mimetype icon editor, mimetype file association, icon theme handling, in-row cell editing for name and mode and owner/group changes, use of sudo for sudoizable commands, verbose diagnostic messages, recursive scrambling/unscrambling of directories, mount/unmount of smb shares, conversion of treeview branches to plugin architechture and something else I can’t remember now.
– During the 4.1.9x and 4.2.x release period you can expect to see changes within the internal organization aimed exclusively to bug fixes, optimization and code clean up.
– When optimization and code cleanup is complete, we might be ready for testing the icon-view representation (target 4.4, God willing).