New features in Rodent Gamma

[Edscott Wilson Garcia]

The comment 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 at fwi.uva.nl>,
    Michael K. Johnson <johnsonm at redhat.com>,
    Michael Shields <mjshield at nyx.cs.du.edu>,
    Charles Blake <cblake at bbn.com>,
    Albert Cahalan <albert at 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
 eyecandy.

** Documentation
 User documentation in pdf and html format will be available. This, and
 final testing, are the items holding release at this moment.



-- 

cheers!

Edscott