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There are several Unix OFM managers written in Java and scripting languages that have a GUI interface. They are covered in subsequent chapters. Here we will discuss only compiled implementations.
Tux Commander Homepage [Project Description]
Tux Commander is open-source file manager with 2 panels side by side written for GTK2. It is developed using Borland Kylix 3 Open Edition (Object Pascal language). The main goal of this project is to create powerful user-friendly file manager for Linux. Some functions are (or will be) inspired by famous Total Commander. This project was started due to lack of quality mc-like file manager using any version of GTK.
This project uses Pascal bindings from the project gtk2 for pascal, designed for Free Pascal Compiler and Borland Kylix. You can now use the official package from the project website, there should not be any incompatibilities while compiling the project in Kylix. It was decided tuxcmd should be independent from any external libraries, the only thing you need is proper GTK+ 2.xx installation, any other links are made by dynamic library loading.
Unlike other open-source projects, the main distribution form of this project is the binary executable, because Kylix compiler doesn't make any optimizations for target systems, as gcc does. The other limitation of Kylix is that it is currently designed only for Linux systems and probably will never support any other Unix-based systems (for example FreeBSD, Mac OS X/Darwin). There's a problem with binary compatibility of VFS modules, principally they could be written in any programming language with different linkers, which could link the module against very specific library - mainly library with version number as the part of the filename. There will be always binary packages available, but I cannot guarantee the functionality of some modules, which are not compiled in Kylix. But you can always compile them yourself, each module has a very few dependecies to the development libraries and making it is easy. And, we are looking for some people which could make binary packages for some mainstream distributions (RedHat9, Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE...).
At this time, tuxcmd is actively developed only by me (tbzatek) without any sources in the Sourceforge's CVS. It is developed in my free time and I cannot guarantee flexible responses to bugfixes and new features, the development progress could be little slow then and might be interrupted for a few weeks (mostly due to my studies). It would be possible to commit the sources to CVS if somebody wants, so then everybody could be able to participate with the project (this mainly comprises development of plugins). After I finish a basic VFS interface, the developers will be able to make a contribution to the project through the plugin form (please see the Development section for more informations).
I will appreciate any support, if you find a bug or some inconsistency, please notice me. There is a wishlist on the Development page, please take a look at it if there is your feature before you ask. Feel free to test this app and write some feedback. I could accept any e-mails also in Czech!XNC -- Northern Captain
the best compiled OFM for XWindows
Northern Captain is a very interesting filemanager for X Windows. I think that it's the best OFM for X Windows in existence. Northern Captain is distributed under GNU General Public License.
Actually this is a very apt name, because OFMs are all about navigation in extreme conditions much like in Arctic and Antarctic.
Leonid V. Khramov began this project as a hobby in December 1995, because at this time there was no OFMs for X on Linux. First two versions of XNC were for internal use, then the author gained access to Internet and decided to make a public release. The first public release was XNC 3.0. The current version (As of October 2003) is of 5.0.2
XNC is a very impressive GUI-based OFM with many interesting functions. It supports VFS for TAR, ZIP, RAR, RPM, LHA. It is also supports Xtree "flat" VFS (called "Branch view display mode" in XNC). It allows you to view all files in subdirectories at the same time (hotkey Ctrl+B).
When executing commands XNC overlays xterm windows on the panels imitating the behavios of the command line interface but I see no capability of seeing "half" of panels in this mode.
has built in Xterminal, viewer for JPEG, GIF, BMP, TGA, XPM, XBM formats, built-in editor, etc.XNC is a highly configurable program.
You can change Layouts, fonts, sizes, colors. HotDir Bookmark with up to ten entries allow jumping to the most useful directories. Drag and Drop make XNC very friendly for mouse fans and allow to perform many actions with files in an intuitive way.
Hot Keys are easily redefinable with XNCSetup. That makes XNC more flexible than MC.
As I already mentioned above, XNC has been ported to all major Unixes including AIX 4.x, NetBSD 1.3, OpenBSD 2.3. Amoung key XNC features I are would to mention:
X Northern Captain Package contains the following programs (each program may be used separately):
Since version 4.4.4 X Northern Captain has plugins support for loading different skins/themes. Two themes are available- Aqua theme and Five theme. You can found screen shots on the main XNC site.
Precompiled binaries are available for all major UNIXes including Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, QNX Neutrino. With some minor modifications XNC can be compiled for Solaris too (The X11 header files don't declare a return type, which is illegal in C++. This is well known problem, and the workaround would be to specify the "-fpermissive" flag to gcc. This turns the errors into warnings.)
RPM is available, see FileWatcher.org - Xnc - X Northern Captain (XNC) - filemanager for X Window (one year, 227 files). One of the most reliable download places is Sunsite/pub/Linux/X11/desktop
X WinCommander (XWC) is a File Manager for the X Window System. It was written by by Maxim Baranov using the FOX C++ GUI tool kit and resembles the Total Commander look and feel. Download
by Sergey Babkin <babkin@users.sourceforge.net>
This project's purpose is a file manager for X11 with the user interface inspired by the Norton Commander (tm). Unlike the other NC clones, I try to keep the interaction with the command line unimpeded and transparent. I also try to do things more in the Unix way. The development is going in the Way of Natural Stupidity: first get sometihng working and then add the features and refine the design. The main architectural goal is to keep the architecture flexible and make future changes easy.
The current state of development is "alpha": at least all the basic features are implemented in at least a basic way.
My article about the Tk geometry managers written in Tcl is now available online - see below.
Read about how to Make Your X11 Look Like The Text Console
Look at the project from the hight of the first anniversary. (Updated on Oct 11, 2001). Some of the statements in this text are not correct, and people have told me that - I've added comments about that in italic as "2003 notes".
www.usenix.org/publications/login/2001-10/pdfs/babkin.pdf My article about the Tk geometry managers written in Tcl was printed in the October 2001 issue of ;login:, the Usenix association magazine. This article is a direct result of experiences with NAC.
New!
I have submitted my proposals for nested lists as
TIP#170. It's
interesting to note that as it turns out, extensions for the lindex
command, a new lset command have been already adopted in Tcl 8.4 with
almost exactly completely the same syntax. So apparently, the idea is fairly
obvious, since at least two people have done it independently in practically the
same way. More similar features with slightly different syntax are in Tcl 8.4 as
well.
See the README file
See the CHANGES log file
See the differences between the README files of the last two releases.
The CVS repository is finally working even though there is a bit of garbage collected in it and I commit the changes infrequently. The right directory to check out is naccvs.
Subscribe to the mailing lists nac-announce (announcements about the new versions of NAC only) and nac-devel (general discussion). There has not been a whole lot of activity on these lists yet but it should start some time. :-)
Use the usual SourceForge services for NAC, such as: CVS, mailing lists and their archives, history of file releases and auto-notification, project news.
See a screen shot
This is how it looks on my machine with my favorite bitmapped font. The image is slightly blurry due to the JPEG compression. The look corresponds to the version 1.0-SNAP-010214 (though in the directory you may see a few newer files).
Want to download this font ? I've personally designed this font for PC somewhere around 1990 and later converted to BDF. In the second half of the table (codes 128-255) it contains PC presudo-graphical characters and Russian letters, available in 3 encodings: Alternative (A.K.A. IBM CP-866) - "alt9x16", Main (A.K.A. GOST-1981 A.K.A. Russian subset of ISO8859/5) - "iso9x16" and KOI-8 (A.K.A. GOST-1974) - "koi9x16".
You may also want to download the mc.ext file (that can be used by NAC) to avoid downloading the whole Midnight Commander.
Pash is console-based manager with some unique capabilities in controlling the processes. It has been written by Pierre Adriaans and is distributed as an Open Source program.. MC developers probably can reuse some nice features.
The most interesting was that Pierre Adriaans was one of few OFM developers who understood the potential of OFMs as a graphic frontend to the Unix shell. As a result Pash went farther then most in this direction:
Besides all the classical file manipulation functions (copy, move, ...), Pash also acts as a shell, allowing you to control Processes and IPC devices. The Process Handling Function allows you to view all your current processes and to send signals to each of them. The IPC Device Control Function will display all the Message Queues, Shared Memories or Semaphores active in the system and allow you to destroy any of them.
Complete source code with makefile for Linux is available from Pierre Adriaans website ("as of January 1997, the complete source code of Pash is available for all you Amiga and Power PC users to play with").
Linux port is available from ibiblio.org and all its mirrors
The Unix Cockpit is an open source program (from version 3.0). It's an X-based File Manager written by Henrik Klagges. UC2.0 is available for many Unix flavors and runs well on modest hardware. Everything, including the online help system, is contained in one single file. No superuser privileges are necessary for installation -- just download the version you like from here or ftp it in binary mode from one of the distribution sites.
gentoo is a file manager written in C. It uses the GTK+ toolkit, and the two-pane concept. What makes gentoo stand out are its graphical configurability and its real cool file typing and styling system. Using the latter, gentoo identifies the type of your files and then uses the style you've defined for the type to determine how to display it in listings. Actively maintained.
gentoo is somewhat inspired in its look & feel by the classic Amiga program DirectoryOpus 4. gentoo has been successfully tested on a variety of platforms, including Linux (x86, Alpha, and PS2/MIPS), Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Features
Some of the main features of gentoo are:
GIT is an
implementation of a command line OFM for Unix produced by Tudor Hulubei <tudor@cs.unh.edu>.
Seems to be actively maintained. Current version as October 2003 is Version
4.3.20. It's very portable: the language used is the old style K&R, so that
even the oldest C compiler, with no ANSI support will have no
problems compiling it.
As far as key bindings it looks like it is less OFM compatible than MC, but file operations have standard OFM bindings (F5-F8). I have no working experience with the product, but it looks that within limits imposed by a particular version of Unix key binding are configurable. This is a definite advantage over MC
GIT contains three interactive programs:
git -- main program -- file system browsergitps -- the process viewer/killergitview -- the ASCII/HEX file viewerEach one of these programs has its own set of key bindings.
GIT is GNU Autoconf based. In the latest version
the build/installation procedure is now based on automake.
The unique capability of GIT among Unix-based OFMs (that make is
somewhat similar to FAR) is a the possibility to add new commands. The
configuration file can be easily enhanced, allowing the user to add new commands
or file operations, depending on its needs or preferences.
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Last modified: April 24, 2008