The file browser

[Chris Brault]

The obvious question arises,

Then why not use ROX? Mine is less than a month old
and still a work in progress. It looks cool, but that
is my nature, to make things look that way; I started
my python programming doing superkaramba on
KDE-Look.org.

> Reasons I don't use it, in no particular order (note
> that these are all
> issues that Rox filer doesn't have):
> 
> Even in small view, it selects a font that is maybe
> five points bigger
> than any other font on my desktop. Since my eyesight
> isn't so good and I
> already use larger fonts than most people, we're
> talking like H2 in HTML
> :-)

This can probably be adjusted somewhere.

> Half the screen is taken up with toolbars. Yes, they
> can be collapsed,
> but I don't have the patience to go through all
> those buttons and figure
> out which ones I'm going to be using regularly.

I didn't have the patience for this either.

> It is bizarrely slow, compared to the rest of XFce4.
> While it is fast to
> start up, operations like a single-file drag-n-drop
> copy (860 bytes)
> take over a second to complete, most of which is
> popping up a file
> progress dialog. Doing it in Rox is as fast as doing
> in an xterm.

I think that the icon view is faster by nature.

> It doesn't ask if I want to copy or move a file when
> I drag-n-drop. 

There's always cut and paste.

> I can't select multiple items by drawing a box
> around them.

That is against the nature of a tree view browser. The
idea of a tree view is to avoid that kind of stuff.

> If I select two items, I have to keep the mouse
> button down while I
> decide where to drag them too; releasing the mouse
> button undoes the
> selection. Every other file manager I'm familiar
> with saves the
> selection state until you click on the background.

Perhaps the developers can help with this.
 
> No thumbnails for image files.

I suspect that this is short in coming

I should say that I am doing a side bar file browser
in a paned window (i.e. it can be gone if you want).
This will be a "quick browser" feature for now,
allowing fast access to locations.

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