Rodent Filemanager

October 18, 2011

Rodent Filemanager (version 4.7.4) is now available for download

Rodent Gamma release 4 (aka xffm-4.7.4) is now available in source tarball and debian packages for i386 and amd64 architecture (these .deb files built on debian-squeeze also work in ubuntu, xubuntu and kubuntu).

mutex/hashtable cleanups... Fix segfault on remote X connection... more pdf viewer options for debian... Add cancel button to find dialog to stop all the multiple threads that may be running.... additonal use of XInitThreads() ... Error control: fallback icons for population elements... disable gtk-icontheme-selection button if no Rodent theme found... Fixed the open with dialog: commands are saved in the temporary cache ...Open with no longer sets default mimetype application, this is done with CONTROL-click on the menu item. Open with should append the application ... Menu items that may set default application now have a tooltip to that effect... update translations ... fix for broken gtk_widget_hide in 2.24 which does not cover all the functionality available in gtk_widget_hide_all (won't hide top level popup menu items).

This release fixes several segfault conditions as well as enhancing the applications menu. Now setting the default application for any particular mimetype is as easy as control-click.

Documentation has also been updated to reflect changes and enhancements to Rodent Filemanager.

Download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xffm/files/

• Bug reports and requests, please use the trackers at sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xffm/
• Discussion, comments or just general suggestions, are welcome at the sourceforge forums (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xffm/forums) or direct mail to the author.

Enjoy

October 1, 2011

Rodent Filemanager 4.7.2 is now available for download

Rodent Gamma release 3 (aka xffm-4.7.2) is now available in source tarball and debian packages for i386 and amd64 architecture (these .deb files built on debian-squeeze also work in ubuntu, xubuntu and kubuntu).

Download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xffm/files/

This release fixes the critical bug identified in Rodent 4.7.0 and 4.7.1 and which affected users with bookmarks which do not exist on the filesystem when the popup menu is summoned. This may happen with an gvfs smb:// path or a local path that no longer exists. For example, if you eliminate the directories for dummies created by some file managers for users who don't have a clue as to where to save videos, documents, downloads and the like, but don't eliminate the associated bookmarks.

Thanks to Liviu and Populus for the identification and fix of this bug.

Release 4.7.2 also has an enhanced dotdesktop plugin, with more informative applications menu (see http://xffm.foo-projects.org/snapshots/dotdesktop-3.png ) and dot-desktop file (launcher) popups (see http://xffm.foo-projects.org/snapshots/dotdesktop-4.png ).

Translations have also been updated.

Please enjoy!

(But don't forget that Rodent is provided as is, with no warranty, in the hope that it may be as useful to you as it is to me)

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September 28, 2011
Rodent Gamma 4.7.1 is now released!

Enhancements from 4.7.0:

• 1. Added direct size options to the "icon size" popup submenu
• 2. Add minimize button to desktop diagnostics window for FVWM users (namely, me).

Bug fixes from 4.7.0:

• 1- doubleclick on non mime-associated text file was creating the "open with" dialog instead of directly going to the default editor. Now it opens the file.
• 2- Bookmark items were not appearing in deskview menu. List was not being initialized.
• 3- Dotdesktop menu items with Exec outside users path (or nonexistant) are not to be included in popup menu.
• 4. Bookmarks in popup menu was not being updated when a non-rodent application was modifying them (i.e. Nautilus or similar).
• 5. Bookmarks monitor was missing a mutex.
• 6. Allow user to permanently hide desktop diagnostics window with the close button and to hide/show with the setting dialog option.
• 7. Fix a race condition between rodent and rodent-desk to generate mime association caches. This bug causes random crashes on initial startup of fresh installations, only once.

Notes:

• 4.7.1 uses the same configuration directories (rfm-Gamma) and build id for user settings (5190) as 4.7.0.

Enjoy!

September 27, 2011
A startup bug (critical) slipped by unnoticed into the 4.7.0 release. You may or may not be affected by it, depending on how your computer deals with parallel processes. The problem is in the generation of the mimetype-application association cache.

If on initial startup you get any warnings of the like "refuse to write" or if you click on a text file and the open with dialog pops up instead of the default editor, then you were affected.

Simple fix: remove all traces with:
$rm -rf `find ~/ -name "rfm-Gamma"`

Then start rodent with "rodent-desk" instead of plain "rodent".

This will avoid the race and generate correct caches. The bug only occurs when the user runs rodent for the first time.
This has been fixed in SVN for release 4.7.1.

Thank you for your comprehension.

September 23, 2011
Rodent Filemanager Gamma is now released (all 57050 lines of code is yours to enjoy!)

Download from sourceforge.

Rodent Gamma (aka xffm-4.7.0, or build 5190) now includes the following new features:

• Inline and online User's Manual (alas! documentation!).
• Rodent icon theme is now XDG spec and includes many new icons. This means you can use the Xfce native Rodent icon theme with your favorite desktop. You can also use any other desktop icon theme with Rodent Filemanager (if this is to your liking). Much appreciation is due to Pablo Morales Romero (Lonerocker) and the resources at Freedesktop.org for making this possible.
• Bash completion is now enabled in the lp-terminal command line and all input dialogs (where applicable). This complements the history autocompletion which was already enabled.
• Rodent-fgr find tool stand alone application.
• New rodent-ps plugin. This allows you to monitor all running processes and send signals with point and click ease. Easy access to all processes makes process control much quicker (for those who know what pid and signals are, of course).
• New rodent-dotdesktop plugin. This allows Rodent filemanager to process dot desktop files (or launchers) adding the following functionalities:
• Applications menu. This appears in the top level menu and includes all installed programs grouped in the conventional desktop categories. So if you are stuck with a gnome panel you don't want just to have the menu, or are tired of waiting for an independent application to generate a menu, here's the small and quick solution.
• Top level Applications launcher folder which contains folders for every category claimed by an installed applications. (Other filemanagers consider the user too stupid to list each and every category... no wait. No other filemanager handles categories the way Rodent does. Rodent's way of handling applications categories is the CDE way, which takes us back to Xfce core roots. Not everything has to emulate Micro$oft these days.)
• Automatic mimetype-application association. If an installed application claims it can open files of this-or-that mimetype, then the popup menu for icons of this-or-that mimetype will have the command enabled (with the correct icon, of course).
• Complete translations to French, German, Russian, Spanish, Chinese and many more languages (af ar as ast az be@latin be bg bn br bs ca ca@valencia crh csb cs cy da de dz el en_CA en_GB eo es et eu fa fi fr fy ga gl gu he hi hne hr hsb hu hy ia id is it ja ka kg km kn ko ku lt lv mai mk ml mr ms nb nds ne nl nn oc or pa pl ps pt_BR pt ro ru si sk sl sq sr@ijekavianlatin sr@ijekavian sr@ije sr@latin sr sv ta te tg th tk tr ug uk uz@cyrillic uz vi wa xh zh_CN zh_HK zh zh_TW.Big5 zh_TW).
• Content folder icons. This features puts a small icon on top of each folder to show the user what type of files the folder contains.
• A lot of other enhancements, optimizations and bug fixes I cannot remember at this point. See ChangeLog for full details.

Note: Following the spirit of Free Software, this project feeds on the collaboration of literally thousands of Open Source programmers, artists and translators. As is proper in an educated environment, due credit to every contributor is acknowledged. If by any chance you notice that a contribution you have made has not been recognized in the "About" dialog, please file a bug report at http://bugs.xffm.org.

Enjoy!

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August 8, 2011: New features in Rodent Gamma

The comments made by Linus confirm what I have known long ago: the Xfce crowd is not made up of dummies.

Anyways, the next step in the xftree evolution, Rodent Gamma, is almost here. This includes several important new features, along with bug fixes and code optimizations. Among the new features you will find:

• ** Bash completion.
  • This is for the lp-terminal and all applicable dialogs where paths or commands may be input via the keyboard. The combination of bash completion and history completion make Rodent's keyboard access extremely fast and powerful, as you may soon discover.
• ** Bookmarks.
  • The standard gtkbookmarks is now used in Rodent. This means that bookmarks generated in Nautilus are available in Rodent and vice versa.
  • Nautilus automatically creates bookmarks for users who don't know where to put videos, music, documents or downloads, and you can easily remove these with Rodent.
  • Adding or removing bookmarks in Rodent is a two click operation. Nautilus, OTH, uses 2 clicks to add but a click-scroll-click-click-click sequence with buttons and text to read in order to remove a bookmark (are they trying to make it impossible for dummies?)
• ** Launchers.
  • This is the Nautilus "terminology" for dot desktop files, which most applications provide upon installation. "Shortcuts" is the term Linus uses. The functionality for dealing with these files is provided by a Rodent plugin and consists of
    • --filesystem navigation through categories
    • --popup menu with the standard gnome/kde categories
    • N_("Accessories")
    • N_("Graphics applications")
    • N_("System Tools")
    • N_("Internet and Network")
    • N_("Games and amusements")
    • N_("Office Applications")
    • N_("Tools for software development")
    • N_("Audio and Video")
    • N_("Personal preferences")
    • NOTE: These categories are arbitrary and if you have a better suggestion for the application popup menu for Rodent Gamma, now's the time to speak up, before the Gamma version is released.
  • Differences with xfce-appfinder:
    • The available categories is only limited by the amount of categories installed in the current system.
    • Categories have their own icon and work as a containing folder for all dot desktop files which list that category as their own.
    • You can browse through categories instead of searching for (search is taken care of with bash completion or find tool, yes?).
  • Differences with Nautilus:
    • Rodent will allow you to treat dot desktop files as what they really are, files, not only icons to double click or drop another icon upon. Please do not interpret this difference with Nautilus as a Nautilus drawback, some consider it a feature: dummies are meant to be fooled into believing launchers are not really files so that they won't mess things up (although this does not always work: dummies are too darn smart).
• ** Processes
  • There was once a super stable OS system which considered everything, including files, as processes. This OS system disappeared because it was proprietary. In the linux world the tendency is to consider everything, including processes, as part of the filesystem. As a part of the filesystem, why shouldn't processes be manageable by a capable filemanager?AFAIK, Rodent is the only filemanager now endowed with this capability.
  • With the rodent-ps plugin, the default behavior of the stop button which appears for backgrounded processes changes. Instead of sending a SIGTERM (and optionally a SIGKILL), a window will open at the point in the process tree where the process is located, giving options to send arbitrary signals to the process (like STOP or CONT), or navigate through the process tree.
  • This plugin has the option to visualize user processes (default) or all processes. You may also toggle the tree structure on and off.
  • I am specially grateful to
    • Branko Lankester <lankeste@fwi.uva.nl>,
    • Michael K. Johnson <johnsonm@redhat.com>,
    • Michael Shields <mjshield@nyx.cs.du.edu>,
    • Charles Blake <cblake@bbn.com>,
    • Albert Cahalan <albert@users.sf.net> and
    • David Mossberger-Tang
    for contributing the powerful and bugfree backend to this Rodent plugin.
• ** Content folder icons
  • This features puts a small icon on top of each folder to show the user what type of files the folder contains. This is a suggestion from kde team to improve and make less "windowy" the Dolphin feature that maps small thumbnails of contained images on folders. Advanced users will not only be interested in quickly locating pictures at a glance, but also pdf, source code, spreadsheets and all kinds of different files. This feature is enabled by default but can be disabled in the settings dialog.
• ** Optimized read and load
  • For those who are interested in reading /usr/bin quickly, Rodent is now about ten times faster than Nautilus. That is what multithreading in multicore enviroment is all about. A search for "g_thread_create" in Nautilus code gives only one match: this does not look good at all, although I may be mistaken.
  • And if you really want speed, you may remove or not install the icons plugin (take the Rodent out of Rodent). This will make the loading of /usr/bin much faster, and cut down memory usage, but will cost you in eyecandy.
• ** Documentation
  • User documentation in pdf and html format will be available. This, and final testing, are the items holding release at this moment.

*

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May 29, 2011: Rodent Beta-2 (aka xffm-4.6.4 ) is now yours!

Rodent Beta release 2 (aka xffm-4.6.4) has now been released and is yours!

This is a bug fix release with many optimizations and new features added.

The most important fix is a race which caused a dbh file corruption with a 1/25 probability on virgin startups. It would only affect the user who had the corrupt dbh file. The corrupt file could be removed with a rm -rf `find ~ -name "rfm*"`.

Anyways, the race condition is fixed in 4.6.4, but if you were unlucky enough with 4.6.2, just remove the rfm directories "~/.cache/rfm", "~/.local/share/rfm" and "~/.config/rfm". This will leave your directory as good as new.

The most important features added to 4.6.4 are:

• New touch frontend: all GNU touch options are now available. Special thanks to
  • Paul Rubin
  • Arnold Robbins
  • Jim Kingdon
  • David MacKenzie
  • Randy Smith
  for the creation of such a powerful and bug free backend to rodent touch.
• Rendering is now done with cairo. This makes for prettier graphics and optimized routines.
• Rubberband selection now does up and down scrolling and will select/unselect on the fly.
• Updated translations: we now have the greater part of the world population covered.
• Remove, find, settings, touch dialogs now run in their own threads.
• Added RTFM and Help buttons for cp, mv, ln, shred and fgr.
• Added a conventional About dialog.
• Migrated pasteboard from server-base to thread-safe client-base.
• Variable icon/thumbnail size (per directory memory) via a zoom-in/zoom-out button.

New requirements:

• bash
• librsvg >= 2.26.0
• cairo >= 1.8.10

Requirements which are now optional: (well, not really. Due to a missing ifdef/endif directive pair, libzip is still required. But the configure script won't abort if it is not found! Please excuse any inconvenience this may cause)

• libzip

A list of reported bugs fixed can be found at http://bugs.xffm.org and unlisted bugs which were also fixed can be found at the ChangeLog file.

Source tarball can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xffm/files/4.6.4/https://sourceforge.net/projects/xffm/files/4.6.4/. You will also find debian i386/amd64 packages (build on squeeze) at this site.

PPA files for Ubuntu are not yet available, but we will try to get them online. Meanwhile, you should be able to use the source tarball or debian packages. Stay tuned.

Build has been tested successfully on Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, ArchLinux and FreeBSD. It should be fine on other Linux distributions too.

And 15 seconds to watch a video, look at the release of Rodent

BTW: The big difference between an advanced user and a dummy, is that the first will RTFM. As such, Rodent's FM will appear shortly at http://xffm.org. Stay tuned on this too.

*

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May 26, 2011: A bit of Rodent (Xffm) history.

Going back in time, Xfce started as a CDE clone. CDE was the "Common Desktop Environment" developed by HP, Sun, Digital and other big box players for their top notch workstations. Definitely cool. Definitely not for dummies.

CDE had a neat filemanager called dtfile, but this was not open source, so Xfce used a variation of Rasca's "Xtree" called "Xftree" as a filemanager. I entered the show by extending Xftree's functionality with the "glob" search engine (now "fgr"), the samba network browser "Xfsamba", the differences viewer "Xfdiff" and a set of dtfile icons, among other things.

Then came the migration to GTK-2. For this Xftree was rewritten as Xffm, retaining all the previous functionality and adding more. The dtfile icon set was replaced by Francois' Rodent icon theme. To distinguish Xffm as a part of Xfce, the first release was tagged 4.0.

Then came 4.2 and the love/hate story started. Those new to Xfce could not understand why Xffm had such a steep learning curve, while those familiar to Xftree expected the nerdy behaviour they had become used to.

Anyways, it was decided that Xfce would no longer distribute a filemanager: this way users could choose the new Thunar filemanager (which, as an independent software, would no longer follow the Xfce version numbers).

Cut loose of the xfce umbilical, xffm was adopted by foo-projects, hosted at Stockholm University. The xffm.org domain was assigned and the web page at http://xffm.org/ was put on the line. The next release of Xffm would no longer follow the Xfce version numbers, but for consistency would not be rolled back.

Xffm-4.5.0, which featured a new user interface (although the old nerdy treeview was still available) was released on 2006-05-24. This remained stable until 2009, when Intel gave me a multicore laptop to start doing multicore software.

The new thread-safe thread-based design (code named "Rodent", for Francois' icon theme) required a rewrite of the Xffm code. For this rewrite several goals were set forth:

• Thread based, thread safe design
• Cleaner and simpler build process
• Faster and more powerful
• Unnerdification (this a bit surreal, coming from a nerd)

As part of the unnerdification, the old treeview is gone. To keep it simple, the graphic part is as simple as the concept developed by the guys at Palo Alto (you know, the guys who first came up with the idea of rodent ---or mouse-- for a computer). Nothing more. Simple uncluttered graphics. Along side this graphic part is the keyboard. A place to issue commands. Graphic, but not for dummies.

The first release of Rodent Alpha, (aka xffm-4.6.0) was in November 2010. And was presented at a conference at the University of Sonora. The second release was much more stable. This was Rodent Beta (aka xffm-4.6.2) in April 2011. The third release, code name Rodent Beta 2 (aka xffm-4.6.4) will be in a few days from today.

Beta 2 is much faster, much more stable and will have over 95% translation for the main non-English speaking Rodent user base (Germany, Spain, France, Ukraine and Russia), along with many other languages. This will be available very soon at the sourceforge download site.

*

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March 31, 2011: After a full year's worth of coding, Rodent Beta is now released! This is release 4.6.2: build 4324 (yes, more than 500 changes since Rodent "Alpha").

This release consists of a source tarball and Debian 32 binaries (Ubuntu 10.04).64 bit binaries will come soon, along with Gentoo ebuild and FreeBSD port...

Many thanks to Greg Inda who has performed extensive testing of the software on production machines and has detected many bugs and oportunities for enhancements.

Rodent Beta now sports a brand new "rodent-diff" helper application (replacing aging xfdiff). With the new rodent-diff, practically all the options of the GNU diff program are available in a graphic front end. For creation of such a powerful backend to rodent-diff, we are grateful to:

• Paul Eggert
• Mike Haertel
• David Hayes
• Richard Stallman
• Len Tower

*

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November 4, 2010: Rodent filemanager "Alpha" is now released! This is build 3710, (aka. 4.6.0).

This release consists of source tarball. Debian 32 and 64 bit binaries will come soon...

Many thanks to Intel Corporation for the hardware provided for thread control development and Auke Kok for the repository resources and website at foo-projects.

*

What is Rodent?

Rodent is fast, small and powerful file manager for the GNU operating system (but it also works in BSD). That's one way to look at it. Another way is to call it a graphic shell (that's probably more accurate).

• Rodent wastes no space on menus or function buttons (display real estate is too valuable).
• All functionality is available through popup menu or keyboard action.
• Popup menu is context sensitive.
• Full lpterminal is available from keyboard.
• Functionality is extendible via plugin tecnology.

What Rodent is not?

Rodent is *not* a filemanager for dummies. Emphasis is on ease of use for the advanced user, not the computer illiterate. Rodent is a cross between a command line terminal and an iconview filemanager: the centaur of open source filemanagers.

Why is Rodent easy to use?

Rodent is not only a point and click application, a fully functional console terminal is also an integral part. In other words, you can type any command from the keyboard and Rodent will have a controlling thread ready and active.

Why is Rodent fast?

Rodent is fast because it uses multithread mechanisms to perform operations in parallel processing. This is the fastest way to work with modern multicore processors. If your processor is not multicore, you may not notice this. Readable image previews of text, image and pdf files pop up by mouse movement, greatly reducing the time required to browse through a directory of unknown files.

Why is Rodent small?

Rodent is small because it adds no unnecesary code. Rodent acts as a graphic front end for "rm", "cp", "mv", "ln", "mount", "touch", "libmagic" and your shell of choice. Some of the developers responsible for the widespread and excellent code used by Rodent are:

• * Richard M. Stallman
• * Torbjörn Granlund
• * David MacKenzie
• * Jim Meyering
• * Mike Parker
• * Paul Rubin

A more complete list of credits is available in the Rodent "about" dialog (build >=4409).

Why is Rodent powerful?

Transparent access to powerful commands such as "sudo" and "convert" allow the user to go beyond the scope of ordinary filemanagers. If the user types "sudo rm -rf *", Rodent will attempt to do just that. As mentioned previously, Rodent is *not* for dummies.

Required packages

Rodent depends on the following packages:

• - bash
• - libXML-2.4.0 or above
• - Glib 2.20.5 or above
• - cairo 1.8.10 or above
• - librsvg 2.26.0 or above
• - GTK+ 2.20.0 or above
• - intltool 0.40 or above
• - libmagic (comes with the "file" utility)
• - gawk (for building from source)
• - libzip-0.9 or above (this is optional)

Rodent uses the following programs:

• - cp
• - mv
• - ln
• - rm
• - touch
• - grep

Included software

The following programs are included with Rodent:

• - fgr
• - rodent-diff
• - rodent-root
• - rodent-mime
• - rodent-desk
• - rodent

Installation from source

The file INSTALL file contains generic installation instructions. For a complete system build:

./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

Please note that for a complete build from source tarballs, a full set of autotools and library development headers and m4 macros will be necessary.

• - libtool-2.2.6 or better
• - automake-1.10 or better
• - autoconf-2.64 or better
• - intltool
• - headers for libraries
  • glib
  • gtk+
  • cairo
  • librsvg
  • libxml2
  • libmagic
  • libzip (optional)

Optional programs

Rodent can optionally use the following programs:

• - tar, compress, zip, gzip, bzip2
• - shred, mount, sudo, file, imagemagick
• - sh, bash, csh, ksh, tsh
• - xterm, gnome-terminal, konsole, Terminal
• - xpdf, sox, mpg123, mplayer
• - gv, gvim, gimp, lyx
• - cdrecord, dvips, gedit, cdplay, dia
• - gkrellm, xkill, abiword
• - rpm, dpkg, pkg_add, pkg_info, pkg_update
• - openoffice or libreoffice
• - anything else you like.

Standards compliance

Rodent supports the following standards/specifications:

* POSIX.1-2001.

How to report bugs?

Bugs should be reported at http://bugs.xffm.org.

Debugging Support: Rodent currently supports three levels of debugging support, which can be setup using the configure flags `--with-debug` or `--with-trace` (check the output of `configure --help`).

• trace: This is extremely verbose output and is not recommended unless tracking a particularly hard to trace bug.
• debug: This should be the default for developer builds, and presents verbose output which must be filtered with "grep" in order to be of any real use.
• none: This is the default for release builds, and presents the recommended behaviour for end users.

Notes

• Rodent Beta is a beta release. The software is production stable, but not all the features scheduled for Rodent Gamma are included.
• FreeBSD users: use gmake in lieu of make, otherwise po directory build will fail.
• Rodent plugins scheduled for Gamma
• Sftp host access
• proc control
• Opendesktop trash
• Samba network
• GNU's not Unix, but Unix is a beast; its plural form is Unixen.
• Rodent is provided "as is" in the hope that the package is as useful to you as it is to me, but with no garantee, as put forth in the GPL-v3 license.