Hey all, I've never really been satisfied with the quality of any Linux file manager (especially Konqueror), and I'm planning on programming my own :). Just for ideas, what would you guys like to have in a file manager type of application or are you already satisfied with Konqueror/Nautilus/whatever? I'm really looking forward to your comments. Cheers!

I'm glad someone's deciding to do another file-manager. I suggest you make it cross-compatable (skinwise) between KDE and Gnome. My major problem with Konqueror and Gnome's (Nautalus I think it is), is that they're so resource-hoggy. What Linux needs is a file browser akin to Windows Explorer, just a really lightweight file browser, nothing more.

Quote: Original post by Mercury
What Linux needs is a file browser akin to Windows Explorer, just a really lightweight file browser, nothing more.

I agree. My experience with Linux file browsers (okay, last time I tried one was three years ago; I've stuck to commandline only since) has been abyssmal. They all seem to me to be huge resource hogs, incredibly slow, and most importantly unresponsive (I thought Linux had node monitoring, so why do filebrowsers not seem to use it?). When I create a file from anywhere, I want it to show up in the file browser immediately. Additionally, when I use Windows Explorer, since I'm more of a keyboard guy I use a combination of keyboard and mouse to get around quickly. Maybe it's changed by now, but last time I used Konqueror there was no easy way to do this (usually keyboard navigation was severely crippled).

windows explorer sucks. best file manager is Total Commander. you can control it only from keyboard, but for the special tasks you can use such "mouse oriented" features as and (wich are inaccessible in Midnight Commander ;)

so... make it equaly comfortable for mouse and keyboard using. I would like to recommed to use Midnight Commander egine, but with pure GUI :)

What about something like CVS integration? Although I would think that eventually people would want other forms of integration and the file manager would be bogged down again...

Perhaps a clean, minimal default setting with an options dialog to enable integration with other programs.

I was also thinking about console integration (with auto-refresh of course).

Cheers!

Quote: Original post by Mercury
I'm glad someone's deciding to do another file-manager. I suggest you make it cross-compatable (skinwise) between KDE and Gnome. My major problem with Konqueror and Gnome's (Nautalus I think it is), is that they're so resource-hoggy. What Linux needs is a file browser akin to Windows Explorer, just a really lightweight file browser, nothing more.

I use an XTerm for that.

xterm is a pretty bad filebrowser imho.

Have it extensible like the Windows shell. This way people could write their own CVS/SVN extensions to it (which would be neat feature IMHO). I'd love a simple Windows-like explorer for Linux. If you got this up and running, I'd be willing to at least try it out for you.

Please Stop bashing Konqueror :-) It's not just a simple file manager, but also an sftp/ftp/webdav/whatnot client and if you need that stuff it's quite hard to beat. Furthermore the latest release in kde 3.4 is not that resource hungry anymore...

If you need a nice clean filemanager try Xfe (comparable to explorer) or ROX filer, but if you still want to code your own, then do a lightweight version of konqui please :-)

> Have it extensible like the Windows shell. This way people could write their own
> CVS/SVN extensions to it (which would be neat feature IMHO).

Nautilus already does this (pluggability, that is), and nautilus itself can be embedded into other gnome applications. Also, it runs just fine on my Pentium 100. Are you sure you're not mistaking its startup order for being slow? Nautilus initializes completely before you can start acting on it. It also delays thumbnailing for a few seconds so that quick browsing is just that.