mc

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 04 July 2007, Tim wrote:
>Tim:
>>> If only there was a DOpus 5 for Linux.  That's a file manager.
>
>Gene Heskett:
>> So was Dirwork2.  So far, none of the filemanagers we have for linux
>> is anywhere near as versatile as either of those two were in 1992.
>
>I dunno Dirwork2, and didn't get very far trying to quickly find out
>what it was.  But for anyone else reading this, and not being familiar
>with Dopus 5, it was NOT a two-pane file program.
>
>It's a *bit* similar to having the nautilus browser open several times
>(i.e. you can have several source and destinations), but you have the
>full array of file managing functions to play with regex or wildcard
>pattern selection for showing, hiding, selecting, files, the usual,
>move, copy, rename, open, delete, functions, custom functions, etc.
>
>It made it blindingly simple, and fast, to move around a lot of files,
>any way that you wanted to.
>
>What MC had against it was:  Slow and tedious to use.  Convoluted
>keyboard navigation, barely working mouse features.  Convoluted
>configuration.  Scrolling anything in a text-only environment is nasty.
>Even the Gnomified version of MC was hideous.  And, the two-pane
>approach is a right pain in the bum if you're doing anything other than
>just working with two directories.

Warning rant:

Yeah, but it sure beats the hell out of trying to convince Konqy or any of the 
other one pane view tools to do what you want when you click on a subdir, and 
it insists on cd'ing the whole system to that tree.  And before somebody 
yells that konqy can be made into a two pane tool, somebody should tell me 
howto save it so it always runs in that mode.  I've not been able to effect 
that here as it always opens in web browser mode.

If you authors of this stuff want to call it a file MANAGER, then give us the 
tools to do it with, complete with to-from views at the same time.  Otherwise 
come up with a new buzzword of the week to name it but don't call it a 
MANAGER.  Yeah, I'm upset, Krusader I thought had some promise, till I found 
it takes 4 or 5 clicks to move one file, and hitting the enter key with a 
filename highlighted was a no op 99% of the time.

If whomever is doing Krusader wants so badly to see mc go away, then first 
explore mc and find out what it can do, then make Krusader do it as well and 
with fewer clicks or keystrokes.  I suspect the pulldowns will also get ugly, 
but that is the price of versatility.  Better yet by a heck of a long row of 
apple trees, get the mc src's and put some of Krusaders gui on top of it.  
Oh, and don't forget that all that stuff should take a silent exit stage left 
if it finds itself running in a ttyN environment where only ncurses can be 
used.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Life is a serious burden, which no thinking, humane person would
wantonly inflict on someone else.
		-- Clarence Darrow