qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

anonymous_user · 2011-03-11 15:24:02

Hey it works. Thats a cool feature!

Wittfella · 2011-03-13 14:15:56

Quick update on something I have been working on.

While debugging some stuff with karabaja4 he sent me his custom actions and I realised that when you use a large number of actions the right-click menu can start to get a bit messy. So I added a way to group actions with submenus. You can do this by adding a ' / ' in the text of the action. Actions with the same prefix will then be grouped together. eg.

jpg,png Open with / gimp
jpg,png Open with / gqview

* Compress / gz
* Compress / bz2
* Compress / lrz

Grab qtfm-4.9.beta.tar.gz if you want to test it out.

Cheers,
Wittfella

ninian · 2011-03-14 18:01:24

Wittfella wrote:

ninian wrote:
Now I'm a little curious as to why qtfm seems to take a relatively (!) fair while to load;
This makes me very sad and troubles me greatly . This is my number one obsession with qtfm, speed, both startup and in use ... I would like to know why the startup is slow for you, because for me its blazing fast! For instance on my good machine (i5) even running in Virtualbox, it starts basically instantly, literally before my finger leaves the mouse button. Even on my slow netbook, it's maybe half second delay .... The only thing I can see that would cause obvious delay to startup is to do with thumbnails ...

Thanks very much for your detailed reply, Wittfilla. My apologies for not answering sooner, but I haven't been online for a few days.

Regarding the startup speed:
There is no doubt qtFM loads up as fast, if not faster, than my other file managers after it has already been run once after a reboot.
However, the delay seems to be running qtFM for the first time after a reboot (tested a few times from a terminal, opening the /tmp directory on the command line, in detailed view). XFE and emelFM2 take roughly a second on my (fairly old) gear, but qtFM seems to take about a couple of seconds. (Worker is faster than the rest, but of course only use X11 libraries, so not a fair test.) My timings are crude, but there does seem to be something consistently holding qtFM back a bit. WIll try and test a bit more when I get the chance

I'm running a very lean Openbox system, with fbpanel, and a Rox panel/pinboard.

PS: Your action submenus for v4.9 seem a great idea!

Last edited by ninian (2011-03-14 18:02:47)

Wittfella · 2011-03-15 02:40:31

Hey ninian,

Ok I understand a little better now. I believe the difference with first run after boot will be because it has to load the Qt libs into memory aswell. After that they are probably cached and hence the startup improvement. I guess I don't notice it because I rarely ever reboot my system.

Not really unique to qtfm, happens with most software to an extent. Same with firefox, seems to take forever the first time, but gets a bit faster after that.

Easy to confirm if its just the loading of Qt libs, after reboot first open another Qt app, like smplayer and then try qtfm.

Cheers,
Wittfella

ninian · 2011-03-15 18:03:37

Wittfella wrote:

I believe the difference with first run after boot will be because it has to load the Qt libs into memory aswell. After that they are probably cached and hence the startup improvement ... Easy to confirm if its just the loading of Qt libs, after reboot first open another Qt app, like smplayer and then try qtfm.

That's it - qtfm itself is innocent! I do use a few Qt apps (such as Vlc, KeepassX) but not on an everyday basis, so the Qt libs won't be cached by default. Testing as you suggested proved the point indeed.

In your detailed post of 2011-03-11, you mentioned that

Wittfella wrote:

I only recently added the custom action override because xdg-open seems to be playing up lately and not detecting filetypes properly. (eg. mp3's are detected as octet-stream).

When writing my opener script I found several similar filetype detection problems with mp3s and html files, when using the 'file' command to get their mimetypes. Therefore I have some override options, including the use of GVFS and Rox to determine mimetypes instead. So, I think your Custom Actions code is essential and not bloat; hence also my interest in the Open * override possibility!

I don't think you commented on this earlier query:

ninian wrote:

2) Trying to sort by clicking on the Owner column in Detail View doesn't seem to produce any meaningful order, in either direction. Since the permissions seem to be combined in the same field with the owner and group, what would we expect to happen?!

Sorting by permissions doesn't seem too sensible, but sorting by owner and/or group is really useful sometimes.

Just for fun: do you have any favourite Windows file managers yourself - there are so many? Q-Dir is the one I use most at the moment (have to use Windows at work, so no qtfm there, sadly!)

urlwolf · 2011-03-20 02:05:24

This is a killer fm. Already displaced pcman. A few feature requests:
- lynx navigation. It's almost there, I can map 'left' to back, but not right to 'open'
- selectable colors. The blue, green etc crash with a dark background
- banded background, like gtk
- selectable icon size

Thanks for making this!

ninian · 2011-03-20 15:53:38

A couple of recent findings:

1) Using version 4.9.beta, I found that if a filename has embedded spaces then the qtfm Open action doesn't behave right - it sees seperate tokens. However, the filename string with embedded spaces is correctly passed intact to a Custom Action.

2) When you copy a file (cut/paste), the copy is given the current time/date, not the time/date of the original file. Can it be an option (or forced) that an identical copy is created?

Last edited by ninian (2011-03-21 00:07:15)

Wittfella · 2011-03-22 07:35:47

urlwolf wrote:

- lynx navigation. It's almost there, I can map 'left' to back, but not right to 'open'
- selectable colors. The blue, green etc crash with a dark background
- banded background, like gtk
- selectable icon size
!

Hey urlwolf, glad you like it, Cheers!

1) I'm not sure why not, I just tried it. EDIT: Sorry, scratch that, I just realised you mean 'go into directory', not 'open'.
2) I'll think about this one.
3) You mean like the custom actions or shortcuts dialog?
4) You want to change the icon size in all the views, not just icon mode? I just played with it a little, making the tree or detail icons bigger looks terrible. Is it you want to make the list icons smaller like in detail view?

ninian wrote:

1) Using version 4.9.beta, I found that if a filename has embedded spaces then the qtfm Open action doesn't behave right - it sees seperate tokens. However, the filename string with embedded spaces is correctly passed intact to a Custom Action.
2) When you copy a file (cut/paste), the copy is given the current time/date, not the time/date of the original file. Can it be an option (or forced) that an identical copy is created?

1) It works fine with xdg-open. I think this might be to do with your custom opener. I remember a while back this problem also existed with xdg-open due to a bug. The fix was to patch xdg-open and add quotes around a variable Check out the xdg-open file, should help. The change you had to make looked something like this if I recall:

$command_exec $1

change to

$command_exec "$1"

2) Known problem with Qt. I think I have to go down to kernel functions to do this, I'll check it out.

Last edited by Wittfella (2011-03-22 07:42:42)

ninian · 2011-03-22 09:04:44

Wittfella wrote:

1) It works fine with xdg-open. I think this might be to do with your custom opener. I remember a while back this problem also existed with xdg-open due to a bug. The fix was to patch xdg-open and add quotes around a variable Check out the xdg-open file, should help. The change you had to make looked something like this if I recall:
$command_exec $1
change to
$command_exec "$1"

Aaargh, now I can't reproduce the problem! Restoring the original xdg-open, running qtfm, and experimenting with xdg-open and my opener directly from the console confirm that all are innocent. When the problem was encountered, I had replaced earlier the original /usr/bin/xdg-open with a symlink to my opener in /usr/local/bin. Have restored this and everything works as expected. Will keep an eye on this as I definitely did not hallucinate it!

Some further small points:
- Is there any way (shortcut and/or menu option) to invert a selection or unselect all? In icon mode it's easy to click on blank space to unselect, but in list mode there's only a tiny strip at the bottom of the listing to click on. (Personally I'd use both 'invert' and 'unselect all' functions quite a lot.)
- Qtfm behaves differently from other file managers (XFE and EmelFM2 at least) when you order by date: qtfm sorts the directories along with the files whereas the others sort the files and directories separately, keeping the directory group always at the top. This seems more sensible and intuitive, or can it be a preference?
- There'a a typo in the spelling of 'Add separator' when right-clicking on the bookmarks panel and in the shortcuts dialogue.
- I'd agree with urlwolf's desire for a "banded background, like gtk"; as you said, this would be like the listings in the custom actions and shortcuts dialogues.

Many thanks for your detailed responses to queries and ongoing work on qtFM.

urlwolf · 2011-03-22 11:13:53

Wittfella wrote:

urlwolf wrote:
- lynx navigation. It's almost there, I can map 'left' to back, but not right to 'open'
- selectable colors. The blue, green etc crash with a dark background
- banded background, like gtk
- selectable icon size
!
Hey urlwolf, glad you like it, Cheers!
1) I'm not sure why not, I just tried it. EDIT: Sorry, scratch that, I just realised you mean 'go into directory', not 'open'.
2) I'll think about this one.
3) You mean like the custom actions or shortcuts dialog?
4) You want to change the icon size in all the views, not just icon mode? I just played with it a little, making the tree or detail icons bigger looks terrible. Is it you want to make the list icons smaller like in detail view?

1) Yes, go into dir is what I meant.
3) Yes
4) I meant in detailed view. right now icons are too small to be useful, just tiny white blobs. In pcmanfm they are slightly larger, enough to see the differences.

Thanks again for qtfm!

karabaja4 · 2011-03-22 13:37:02

urlwolf wrote:

- banded background, like gtk

ninian wrote:

- I'd agree with urlwolf's desire for a "banded background, like gtk"; as you said, this would be like the listings in the custom actions and shortcuts dialogues.

I'd have to disagree on this (this is like alternating row colors?). In my opinion that looks ugly as hell, destroys the nice clean view, one of the things I liked about qtfm compared to other filemanagers. If this is going to be implemented please make it optional

Wittfella · 2011-03-22 14:40:25

Hey, updated 4.9.beta, been playing around with some stuff.

CHANGELOG wrote:

- added 'Open folder' action (for keyboard navigation)
- added 'Focus address' action so you can bind key to jump to address bar.
- you can now change icon size in each view independently.
- added a daemon mode (qtfm -d)

Playing around with a daemon mode. I'm still not really convinced the benefit is worth the added complexity but test it out, see if you like it. Start 'qtfm -d' from .xinitrc or gmrun or similar. Then just use qtfm like normal, but now the startup is instant.

Close qtfm with the WM button or alt-F4 to keep daemon active. Closing with the menu 'Exit' will stop the daemon.

@ninian no invert selection but you can clear the selection with Refresh (F5) or Cancel (esc).

karabaja4 · 2011-03-22 15:08:43

Hey,

- icon zooming has a bug, it does not remember previous settings when closing an instance and then opening it again. But, when you try to zoom in that new instance, it zooms where it left off before (i.e. if you zoomed before to 2x new instance openes in 1x, but it will have first zoom from 1x to 3x). This is without daemon mode.

- daemon mode works great, but when you close minimized window (by right-clicking on panel on tint2), the new window also starts minimized. Could you make that each new window starts restored? Also, each new window starts where it last left off, which can be confusing when constantly working (opening & closing) with multiple windows (which one will be restored O.o). I think it would be better if you would just start new window that came from daemon as if you opened a new instance, starting in your /home/user etc...

- is it just me or does tree scrollbar "appear" 1-2 seconds after starting qtfm if tree isn't high enough to display all folders? I didn't notice this before because my window is large enough to accomodate whole tree list. Does not happen in daemon mode (understadable).

- I think you should replace 'Open' with 'Open folder' by default on folders. Who uses 'Open' on folder anyway (that one opens folder in new window)? Also, you should consider renaming 'Exit' to 'Exit and close daemon'...

Last edited by karabaja4 (2011-03-22 15:51:08)

urlwolf · 2011-03-24 22:41:05

minor bug. When dragging and dropping across two qtfm windows, if destination has an item selected, the process doesn't complete.

-small feature request. When the address bar gets focus, could we get the entire path selected by default?

urlwolf · 2011-03-27 03:23:49

Another small request
It seems that the icon set is hardcoded on the config file (gnome).
I want to use elementary, but if I change the config, it's immediately overwritten with the default (gnome). This is very important since the smaller the icon size, the better the icon set must be.
Thanks!

Wittfella · 2011-03-27 03:57:20

Hey urlwolf,

It's not hard coded, it should read your theme from the '.gtkrc-2.0' file. You might be seeing a leftover in the conf file, I changed the key name a while back. Delete the qtfm.conf file and start fresh if in doubt.

About the drag/drop bug, I checked it out and I think it is a Qt bug. It appears in icon and detail view, but works ok in list view. In icon/detail view I don't get the 'drop' signal at all, it just wigs out.

urlwolf · 2011-03-27 18:20:14

I deleted the qtfm.conf file. After launching qtfm, a new one is created. It has a single line, saying:

currentTheme=gnome

it wants the damn gnome icon set, no matter what I say in gtkrc-2.0:

# DO NOT EDIT! This file will be overwritten by LXAppearance.
# Any customization should be done in ~/.gtkrc-2.0.mine instead.

#gtk-theme-name="Clearlooks Compact"
#gtk-icon-theme-name="Rodent"
gtk-icon-theme-name = "elementary"
gtk-theme-name = "elementary"

gtk-font-name="FreeSans 10"
gtk-cursor-theme-size=0
gtk-toolbar-style=GTK_TOOLBAR_BOTH
gtk-toolbar-icon-size=GTK_ICON_SIZE_LARGE_TOOLBAR
gtk-button-images=1
gtk-menu-images=1
gtk-enable-event-sounds=0
gtk-enable-input-feedback-sounds=0
gtk-color-scheme=""

I do have those icons, and can select them with gnome:

~/.icons ♪ ls
bws-Icons/ bws_Icons.tar.gz elementary/ nuvola/ ROX@

Any idea what to try next?
Thanks

Wittfella · 2011-03-28 01:46:20

Hello urlwolf,

2 things I can think of, you are using gnome environment, but are using lxappearance to change themes? What happens if you change themes/icons the gnome way? Sorry don't use gnome so I don't know exactly, but there must be a standard gnome way to set the theme. I've tested with ubuntu and it works fine.

Reading the gtkrc-2.0 is like a last resort. Qt will recognise gnome, kde and I think xfce environments, and will detect the theme internally. For non-DE people it will fallback and read the gtkrc-2.0 file to determine the theme.

The other thing to try - I am not sure that Qt will recognise stuff in "~/.themes" or "~/.icons". Try moving your elementary icons to "/usr/share/icons".

Cheers,
Wittfella

Last edited by Wittfella (2011-03-28 01:47:53)

urlwolf · 2011-03-28 02:57:05

I've moved elementary icons to "/usr/share/icons" but nothing changes.
All gtk apps changed icons when I switched them in gnome-appearance-settings.

Is there any way I can force reading the gtkrc-2.0? I don't think qtconfig will pick up the icons from gtk.
It is using the theme plastique. There's a 'system default' appearance, but does not respectthe appearance in the gnome theme anyway.

Forcing Reading the gtkrc-2.0 would be the best, if possible.

Thanks!

Wittfella · 2011-03-28 04:25:41

Well I'm out of ideas. For some reason your gnome system is reporting that its using gnome icons. I just checked my ubuntu VM and it works fine. If I change icons in appearance-settings, qtfm changes no problem. Interestingly ubuntu doesn't even have a .gtkrc-2.0 file.

The Qt theme (qtconfig) dosen't have anything to do with icons.

anonymous_user · 2011-03-28 04:50:56

@urlwolf - what happens if you delete gtkrc-2.0 and use Gnome to change the icons to something else then change it back to elementary?

student975 · 2011-03-28 05:06:13

@Wittfella

Can you, please, comment qtFM place on this "rating"? - https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 78#p909578

urlwolf · 2011-03-28 12:39:22

anonymous_user wrote:

@urlwolf - what happens if you delete gtkrc-2.0 and use Gnome to change the icons to something else then change it back to elementary?

Nothing. Gnome doesn't touch it. In fact, I suspect qtconfig doesn't even read it.
Right now I have an empty gtkrc-2.0. both lyx and qtfm have their gnome icons as usual. Remember this is the plastique theme, not clearlooks, nor system default. But I just tried those... they ignore icon settings from gnome.

Maybe qtconfig doesn't work well. I'm using sabayon, in case it matters.

tri1976 · 2011-03-30 15:19:45

Feature request - match more than one type characters. For example, I have 3 files jack.sh, jot.sh and open.sh, when I type "jo", current behavior is it will goto jack.sh then open.sh. It would be nice if qtfm can goto jot.sh instead.

Can you add a filter box to display only files/folders that match the filter?

tri1976 · 2011-04-02 11:54:40

Another feature request - add currently displayed path to title bar. For example, when I have multiple qtfm windows open, I look on my taskbar and they all say "qtFM v4.8". It would be nice if it can also show the currently displayed directory in the title so one window shows "/usr - qtFM v4.8" and the other shows "/etc - qtFM v4.8".

Arch Linux

#626 2011-03-11 15:24:02

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#627 2011-03-13 14:15:56

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#628 2011-03-14 18:01:24

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#629 2011-03-15 02:40:31

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#630 2011-03-15 18:03:37

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#631 2011-03-20 02:05:24

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#632 2011-03-20 15:53:38

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#633 2011-03-22 07:35:47

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#634 2011-03-22 09:04:44

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#635 2011-03-22 11:13:53

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#636 2011-03-22 13:37:02

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#637 2011-03-22 14:40:25

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#638 2011-03-22 15:08:43

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#639 2011-03-24 22:41:05

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#640 2011-03-27 03:23:49

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#641 2011-03-27 03:57:20

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#642 2011-03-27 18:20:14

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#643 2011-03-28 01:46:20

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#644 2011-03-28 02:57:05

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#645 2011-03-28 04:25:41

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#646 2011-03-28 04:50:56

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#647 2011-03-28 05:06:13

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#648 2011-03-28 12:39:22

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#649 2011-03-30 15:19:45

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

#650 2011-04-02 11:54:40

Re: qtFM - Small, fast, light Qt filemanager

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