[plug] File browser

[Daniel Foote]

> Currently I am using xffm the XFCE4 (XFCE4 is my WM) file manager. This
> has a two pane interface with both panes independant (a bit like MC) I
> can either have a tree view by expanding the directory, or I can double
> click on the directory to change the "root" of the pane. It supports
> "drag and drop" and "open with" as well as multiple open with commands.
> It's still not quite what I am after as it does not have a command
> line. But wait.. Just tried a "open with" on a directory and specified
> my terminal (xfterm4) and it opens the directory as a terminal! :) Well
> that is that problem taken care of, I'm happy.

Sounds like you're running an old version of XFCE then.

Debian Unstable over the last few weeks has been packaging a SVN
version of XFCE4 currently marked as "4.3.90.1 (Xfce 4.4 BETA1)".

XFCE4 was always good... as was XFCE3 before it... but the newer one
is great. Same lightweight WM that we're used to, but on steroids (I
run it on everything here from a PII 400MHz/64MB RAM through my
AMD64/1024MB RAM box (4 machines total). Feels almost identical in
terms of speed across these machines).

It now has unlimited panels and you can do what you like with them
(ie: full monitor width, span all monitors, etc). It also comes with
"Thunar", the replacement filemanager for XFFM. It's a lot like
Nautilus - but lighter. (Still a bit more work to go, but quite usable
right now - I also wasn't really a fan of XFFM. The command line still
does 99% of stuff for me, though).

Other features of note in the new version:
- Built in multimonitor wallpaper spanning (not too many window
managers or proprietary OSs with that out of the box).
- XFCE can for the first time have icons on the desktop - either
minimized programs, nothing, or file icons (from ~/Desktop/). I've got
rather used to not having desktop icons, so that doesn't make much
difference for me.
- Complete, smooth, simple session management - instead of manually
running various XFCE processes from my ~/.xsession, now I just run
"startxfce4" (from ~/.xsession) - and that handles starting everything
else - including starting Xscreensaver. I'm not used to running with
session management, which gave me a surprise this morning when I
logged back into my desktop PC after yesterdays update.

If you're running Debian Unstable, I would highly recommend upgrading
XFCE4. At the moment the dependancies are still a bit funny, and it
will delete some older xfce4 packages that depend on the old xfce4
libraries, but the only difference in the end is that there isn't
currently a Date/Time plugin that was in earlier versions.

Have fun...

Daniel Foote.