Ubuntu Planning To Develop Its Own File Manager

[ByteTraveller]

For people that don't know yet SpaceFM (features, screenshots) is the spiritual successor to pcmanfm (via pcmanfm-mod). It can be made to look simple or ridiculously complicated, and is not developed in the recent 'fuck people who know what they are doing' style - the GUI is almost completely customisable and extendable (change menu items, add new ones, add new menu trees etc), launch your own scripts from whereever, plugin implementation along with a superior zenity clone to allow for an easy UI... I could go on and on.

The programmer has taken it upon himself to avoid being tied as much as possible to other projects which he views with great suspicion such as GNOME and Red Hat things (e.g. udisks), so avoids GNOME dependencies and even wrote his own mount manager (udevil) when RH released udisks2 without backwards compatability to udisks1's interface or even the previous features available.

SpaceFM is packaged in Debian.

[GreatEmerald]

Dolphin should have been an obvious choice here. Though it might depend on other KDE technologies which Canonical might not like to include just to be able to load Dolphin. And more importantly Canonical wouldn't own the copyright, which seems to be their most important goal atm. It really gets me thinking that they might want to market a version of Ubuntu that includes proprietary add-ons, similar to what Google is doing with Android recently.

PCManFM has no KDE dependencies. Or Andromeda, at that (although it probably won't get Qt5 treatment). But yes, the lack of CLA is probably not good from Canonical's point of view.

[CrvenaZvezda]

Why not just drop Gnome and use KDE with the lovely Dolphin?

[mrugiero]

So what do you use a file manager for?
I thought people still used the terminal for the "real" work.
Nautilus recursive search is perfect for movies, pdf doc, and ebooks. Everything else use the terminal.

I don't know, you are naming all the things for which I don't need any kind of help tracking them. I know where is every movie, every book, every document in my computer. I only use the search-as-you-type feature to get there faster instead of having to skim over several files. I'm not saying recursive search is something you shouldn't have, but to replace the traditional search in folder as the action to do when typing on the file manager is way overkill, and it's probably way slower (I can't really tell as I haven't used it).
As for real work, yes, I actually use the terminal, not only because it's faster to tell what you want to do with a command than with the mouse, but because it works more reliably on my system. I don't know why, but when I move things to external storage Thunar or whatever controls the IO when you move files with Thunar seems to "finish" on the GUI before the buffer are flushed (or that's my guess), leading to "pending operations" when unmounting and file corruption. I never have this problem when using the console for such tasks. I admit I was too lazy to report this, so I don't blame them for not fixing it. I hope someone else already reported it as I already found my work around and I'll obviously procrastinate the report for centuries.

Not self-named, but self-proclaimed. The user titles are only set by Michael (that's why some people have incorrect titles, like RahulSundaram, and some others don't have the titles they should have, like twriter).

Yes, that's what I meant. But when I realized the term wasn't suitable for what I meant it was too late to edit.

[verde]

YES YES YES.. Nautilus suck!

[Akka]

Dolphin should have been an obvious choice here. Though it might depend on other KDE technologies which Canonical might not like to include just to be able to load Dolphin. And more importantly Canonical wouldn't own the copyright, which seems to be their most important goal atm. It really gets me thinking that they might want to market a version of Ubuntu that includes proprietary add-ons, similar to what Google is doing with Android recently.

Dolphin is not qml. I'm pretty sure they need a touchscreen friendly gui. I get the impression they is planning use qml for this in the core apps. Kde also has a qml alternative to dolphin for KDE active.

[Akka]

I don't know, you are naming all the things for which I don't need any kind of help tracking them. I know where is every movie, every book, every document in my computer. I only use the search-as-you-type feature to get there faster instead of having to skim over several files. I'm not saying recursive search is something you shouldn't have, but to replace the traditional search in folder as the action to do when typing on the file manager is way overkill, and it's probably way slower (I can't really tell as I haven't used it).
As for real work, yes, I actually use the terminal, not only because it's faster to tell what you want to do with a command than with the mouse, but because it works more reliably on my system. I don't know why, but when I move things to external storage Thunar or whatever controls the IO when you move files with Thunar seems to "finish" on the GUI before the buffer are flushed (or that's my guess), leading to "pending operations" when unmounting and file corruption. I never have this problem when using the console for such tasks. I admit I was too lazy to report this, so I don't blame them for not fixing it. I hope someone else already reported it as I already found my work around and I'll obviously procrastinate the report for centuries.


Yes, that's what I meant. But when I realized the term wasn't suitable for what I meant it was too late to edit.

I like the search paradigms. I the terminal I am using search or filtering on search a lot, grep, find, local etc.
In the same way I seldom use a file manager to browse anything. The biggest problem with nautilus for me is the lack of proper regex.

[rohcQaH]

Dolphin should have been an obvious choice here. Though it might depend on other KDE technologies which Canonical might not like to include just to be able to load Dolphin.

With the migration to KDE Frameworks 5, the dependencies should be very manageable. Either include them, or disable the feature (nepomuk etc), or replace them with a lightweight stub (KIO, systemsettings, ..).
Should be less work than implementing an own filemanager from scratch.

And more importantly Canonical wouldn't own the copyright, which seems to be their most important goal atm.

Yes. Which makes quotes like these seem just that much more sinister:

the new core apps are all 100% developed by the community under guidance of the canonical design team.

"Dear community, please write the app we need. Of course we'll provide a few devs to tell you exactly what to do, and we'll assume all copyright on anything you do. Thanks!"

Dolphin is not qml.

What do you think takes longer:
a) paying their devs to help port dolphin to qml
b) paying their devs to write a qml-based filemanager from scratch
?

[markg85]

Accretion

Hmm, interesting.

They want something with more Qt and QML. They should take a look at my Accretion project.
However, it also drags in KIO (kde library for those that don't know) which might drag in some more KDE related libraries.

[tuubi]

I don't know why, but when I move things to external storage Thunar or whatever controls the IO when you move files with Thunar seems to "finish" on the GUI before the buffer are flushed (or that's my guess), leading to "pending operations" when unmounting and file corruption.

I think the problem lies deeper in the system than the file manager. I remember that fixing this required some fiddling back on older Xubuntu versions (I think the last one I tried was 12.10, can't say if it still had that problem), but it's worked fine out of the box on the last couple of Mint Xfce releases I've used. You'd most probably see the same thing with other graphical file managers unless you fix (or your distro fixes) the underlying problem.