0.8 beta 3 Issues

[diyan]

Bugs:

Filenames with several dots:
- create file or folder with name "Several.dots.folder"
- shift + F6
- selected "Several" instead of "Several.dots"

Copy dialog resize:
- start copying
- swith into Full then into Brief mode
- some controls doesn't fit into dialog

Add horizontal resizing into dialog Copy/Move

Russian translation problems:
- Too long "Current speed" string in Copy/Mode dialog

Suggestions:
- Add options use Icons for exe-files and other types from OS
- Background folder copying and moving
- Add support for 7-zip archives
- Add panel with drive buttons (like in Total Commander)
- Any SDK? Plugins/Extension support?
- Use tabs instead of Window switching
- Language changing without application restart
- External command-line archivers support
- Internal archivers tuning (at least command-line options editing)
- Permanently file deleting (without garbage)
- Sort by file extension

[hritcu]

Filenames with several dots:
- create file or folder with name "Several.dots.folder"
- shift + F6
- selected "Several" instead of "Several.dots"

Why is this a bug? Think tar.gz!

[hritcu]

Suggestions:
- Background folder copying and moving
- Any SDK? Plugins/Extension support?
- Use tabs instead of Window switching
- External command-line archivers support
- Sort by file extension

+1 for these ones

[diyan]

Filenames with several dots:
- create file or folder with name "Several.dots.folder"
- shift + F6
- selected "Several" instead of "Several.dots"

Why is this a bug? Think tar.gz!

But we have a lot filenames with simple extenstion like ".zip", ".exe", ".html", ".sh", ".conf"...
And I think that extension like "tar.gz" is exception of rule.

[hritcu]

Filenames with several dots:
- create file or folder with name "Several.dots.folder"
- shift + F6
- selected "Several" instead of "Several.dots"

Why is this a bug? Think tar.gz!

But we have a lot filenames with simple extenstion like ".zip", ".exe", ".html", ".sh", ".conf"...
And I think that extension like "tar.gz" is exception of rule.

All your examples have a single extension, so I don't see how they are example of anything.

[Nicolas]

Oi, calm down chaps. No need to get unpleasant.

Regarding the dot issue, what's certain is that some people feel one way and some feel the other. Maxence and I are currently discussing this issue and will try and come up with a solution that makes everybody happy - we're tentatively toying with the idea of allowing 'power users' to specify a regular expression that will be used to match what they believe to be the extension of a file. More on that later.

As for the other issues:

Copy dialog resize

Couldn't reproduce that problem, would you mind taking a screenshot so that I can see exactly what the problem is?

Russian translation problems: Too long "Current speed" string in Copy/Mode dialog

I'll take your word for it :)
What would you use instead then? Neither Maxence nor I speak Russian, so we'll need you to help us fix that one...

Add options use Icons for exe-files and other types from OS

That's a nice idea, but saddly I doubt it'll ever work that way. This would require us to write too much platform specific code, probably using JNI, and this is not at all the direction we want to take muCommander towards.

Background folder copying and moving

Agreed, that's in our todo list and will make it to a later release. It's definitely a much needed feature.

Add support for 7-zip archives

You're not the first to ask that, and this is something that we do intend to do - when the good people working on this format see it fit to provide a working Java implementation :)

Add panel with drive buttons (like in Total Commander)

Probably not, I fear it would make the UI a bit too busy. You are aware that you can access the drive button list by pressing alt-f1 and alt-f2, right?

Any SDK? Plugins/Extension support?

Not yet, but definitely planned, yes. Not sure when it'll happen, but this is definitely what we have in mind for the future of muCommander.

Use tabs instead of Window switching

Absolutely. I want that feature myself, so I don't think it'll be too long before it makes it to the nightly build.

Language changing without application restart

This is definitely possible but frankly, the huge amount of work required for what we think is such a tiny improvement... I don't think it's worth it at all.

External command-line archivers support

I *think* we already have that. Check out this post:
http://www.mucommander.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=420

Permanently file deleting (without garbage)

Well, that's what we have already. What we don't have is the recycling bin :)

Sort by file extension

Noted, I'll see what we can do about that.

Thanks for the feedback mate, keep it coming :)
Nicolas

[Sven Siegmund]

I have the 0.8 beta 3 installed, I opened a second window of muC and found out that the keyboard shortcut meant for switching between windows (command+1, command+2) is not working. The menu item "Window" lights up, but does nothing.

Please rethink whether you want to keep those keyboard shortcuts for window switching the way they are now. If so, I hope that these are intelligent shortcuts which focus on the key to be pressed, and not on the '1' to be written. The Czech keyboard which Czech users are likely to use has no numbers mapped to the unshifted number row. That row is used to write most of the special characters of the Czech alphabet. They have the sign '+' mapped to key 1, 'ě' mapped to key 2, 'š' to 3 and so on.

However, I tried the window switching commands with german and english keyboard, they still aren't working.

[Nicolas]

Ah. Well, that's a bug.
The actual keyboard shortcut is ctrl-1, ctrl-2, ... not command-1, command-2...
I'm not sure why the shortcut is not displayed properly in the menu, that's something we need to investigate.

Also, if you don't want to use these shortcuts, you always have the system default:
- alt-tab under windows
- apple-~ under mac os x
- depends on your window manager on other systems.

Thanks for the feedback!
Nicolas

[foetz]

- apple-~ under mac os x

it's apple + tab.

and my definite vote for tabs. with that and the disabled confirmation dialogues muc would be hard to beat. maybe impossible

[Nicolas]

apple-tab is to switch from one application to another, but it's actually apple-~ to switch from one window to another in the same application.

Tabs are definitely something we want to have and will be working on as soon as we're done with a few things we have in the work - mostly cleanup and finalisation of the 0.8 version, as well as a plugin system.

Same goes for disabling confirmation dialogs: we know how to do it and what we need to finish in order to implement that, but while it's a really cool feature, it's not going to make it to version 0.8. It might come very soon afterwards, it's just a matter of extending our Action mechanism, but we really want to get rid of that "beta" flag that's been stuck on muCommander for way too long.

Thanks for the feedback!
Nicolas

[foetz]

apple-tab is to switch from one application to another, but it's actually apple-~ to switch from one window to another in the same application.

i'm sorry. misunderstood what you meant.

Tabs are definitely something we want to have and will be working on as soon as we're done with a few things we have in the work - mostly cleanup and finalisation of the 0.8 version, as well as a plugin system.

great

Same goes for disabling confirmation dialogs: we know how to do it and what we need to finish in order to implement that, but while it's a really cool feature, it's not going to make it to version 0.8. It might come very soon afterwards, it's just a matter of extending our Action mechanism, but we really want to get rid of that "beta" flag that's been stuck on muCommander for way too long.

also great!

Thanks for the feedback!
Nicolas

thank you for that neat app!

[mato]

Hallo,

Yesterday I installed muCommander 0.8 beta 3 from FreeBSD's ports collection and I've run into the following while evaluating the software:

I'm not sure where is default system shell taken from but argument -l is unrecognised here on FreeBSD.

I have some tgz archives that shows duplicate contents in muCommander. (I think they've been created with FreeBSD's libarchive.) I can send you really small example file to investigate.

File permissions are displayed incorrectly in both the main window as well as in permissions window.

I can see Reveal in Nautilus in File menu although I have no Gnome not even Nautilus installed on my system. And when I choose it VLC is started. Funny. Instead, my ROX-Filer could be detected (configured).

There are no suid/sgid/sticky check boxes in file permissions dialogue.

A quick way to switch displaying of hidden files on and off would be very useful. Many times people need to use a hidden file while most of the time displaying them would just clutter display and there's no easy way atm other than sinking to the preferences dialogue.

In Total Commander Shift-F4 opens a dialogue similar to Shift-F7 in muCommander but it automatically fills the input box with a file name under the cursor. It is quite useful as you easily can edit it and thus create a new file with name similar to the existing one.

In Total Commander Spacebar does something slightly different than Insert -- both select file/dir under cursor but if cursor is on directory Space not only selects it but also calculates its size and displays it instead of <DIR> text. It's quite useful.

I'm used to navigate within directory with cursor keys left and right -- they function similarly to PageUp/PageDown when Total Commander does not display file/dir details and window/tab contents scroll horizontally instead of vertically. This way you don't have to move your fingers from cursor keys which is especially useful on laptops where PgUp/PgDn keys are sometimes located in strange places. I would invite if there was a choice to change current behaviour of leaving/entering directory to scrolling a page down/up when using left/right cursor keys.

There's long time established Control-\ combo to take you to the root directory (could replace or complement Shift-Backspace).

Regarding renaming file with multiple extensions, I would suggest for a simpler approach than regular expressions mentioned in forums -- a radio box to choose whether left-most or right-most dot in filename should be considered as extension separator. Easy to implement and cover the cases users argued about.

Well, I guess that's enough for now. :-)
Thank you for very promising and already quite useful NC-like program.
I wish you guys all the best!

Martin

[Nicolas]

Hey there,

Sorry it's taken so long to reply, I've been kept rather busy by my day job - what with the tokyo game show approaching and everything, it's been a crazy time in the office.

To answer your points:

I'm not sure where is default system shell taken from but argument -l is unrecognised here on FreeBSD.

It's not? damnit, I thought this was the standard 'make this a login shell' /bin/sh argument?

I have some tgz archives that shows duplicate contents in muCommander. (I think they've been created with FreeBSD's libarchive.) I can send you really small example file to investigate.

That something we sort of know about, yes. Samples would be useful, although I don't know if we can actually do something about that problem.

File permissions are displayed incorrectly in both the main window as well as in permissions window.

Can you tell me which version of Java you're using? If it's 1.5 or under, that's normal, these version do not support file permissions. Try upgrading to 1.6.

I can see Reveal in Nautilus in File menu although I have no Gnome not even Nautilus installed on my system. And when I choose it VLC is started. Funny. Instead, my ROX-Filer could be detected (configured).

Now *that* is something that freaks me out. In theory, the only way for muCommander to use Nautilus is for some Gnome specific environment variables to be set.

I'll look into this and will probably come back with a few questions about your system.

Alternatively, if you're a coder, you can grab the sources off the developer's portion of the site and try to trace that. The bit of code that you're looking for is com.mucommander.PlatformManager.

There are no suid/sgid/sticky check boxes in file permissions dialogue.

Absolutely. Java doesn't offer that kind of control over the file system, I'm afraid.

A quick way to switch displaying of hidden files on and off would be very useful. Many times people need to use a hidden file while most of the time displaying them would just clutter display and there's no easy way atm other than sinking to the preferences dialogue.

Not a bad idea at all. This never occured to me because I always have hidden files turned on, but this is definitely doable. I'll look into this and let you know how it turns out.

In Total Commander Shift-F4 opens a dialogue similar to Shift-F7 in muCommander but it automatically fills the input box with a file name under the cursor. It is quite useful as you easily can edit it and thus create a new file with name similar to the existing one.

Mmm, yes, that would make sense. That shouldn't be too hard to implement either. Let me look into it.

In Total Commander Spacebar does something slightly different than Insert -- both select file/dir under cursor but if cursor is on directory Space not only selects it but also calculates its size and displays it instead of <DIR> text. It's quite useful.

That's actually something that Maxence and I have talked about a few times in the past. I really can't say whether we'll ever implement it, but it is under discussion.

I'm used to navigate within directory with cursor keys left and right -- they function similarly to PageUp/PageDown when Total Commander does not display file/dir details and window/tab contents scroll horizontally instead of vertically. This way you don't have to move your fingers from cursor keys which is especially useful on laptops where PgUp/PgDn keys are sometimes located in strange places. I would invite if there was a choice to change current behaviour of leaving/entering directory to scrolling a page down/up when using left/right cursor keys.

That's entirely up to you: locate your preferences folder (as described in http://www.mucommander.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=443) and edit the action_keymap.xml file.

The actions you want are:
- com.mucommander.ui.action.SelectFirstRowAction
- com.mucommander.ui.action.SelectLastRowAction
- com.mucommander.ui.action.GoToParentAction
- com.mucommander.ui.action.OpenAction

There's long time established Control-\ combo to take you to the root directory (could replace or complement Shift-Backspace).

You're right, it might be worth adding this to the default action keymap. In the meantime though, you can configure muCommander to behave that way: edit your action_keymap.xml file again, look for com.mucommander.ui.action.GoToRootAction and change the associated keyboard shortcut.

Regarding renaming file with multiple extensions, I would suggest for a simpler approach than regular expressions mentioned in forums -- a radio box to choose whether left-most or right-most dot in filename should be considered as extension separator. Easy to implement and cover the cases users argued about.

Well, for the moment, we're experimenting with various implementations, see what works best for us. I believe the current nightly build considers the extension to be anything after the last dot rather than the first one.
We'll probably end up doing it the way you suggest though, that's the most flexible approach.

Whew. Quite a long post to answer to :)
Thanks a lot for the feedback, and keep your eyes peeled - you might see a lot of the changes you mentionned creep up in the nightly build in the near future :)

Nicolas

[Nicolas]

This is a bit of a shot in the dark, but you wouldn't happen to have a gnome-open command in your PATH, would you?

[mato]

Hallo Nicolas,

AFAIK, apart from Linux, /bin/sh in majority of Unices is the (copy of) original Bourne shell, not Bash.
For list of (its FreeBSD) arguments please see <http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sh&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+6.2-RELEASE&format=html>
Note that you can find man pages for other unices there too.

Well, if you let me know an email address I would send you a sample archive of less than 2KB.

OK, I'll try Java 1.6 as I'm using 1.5 ATM.

Yeah, gnome-open is in my PATH. It's been installed with package libgnome-2.18.0_1 (which itself has been installed as a dependency). I do not run/use Gnome and I do not have Nautilus installed.
Why VLC is started is funny anyway.
And could you possibly check for ROX-Filer ? , part of ROX Desktop <http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/static.html> please.

Regarding space bar -- It shouldn't be difficult to implement as you already have size calculation in properties. And user could choose whether use this (Total Commancer's) feature. And if they did so, there's still Insert key to use if they don't want calculation to take place. :-)

Well, that's enough for now. I'll try to give it a run with Java 1.6 asap. I'm not sure about nightlies as I prefer to install & run SW from FreeBSD's ports collection only. (Maybe you can release more often;))

Thanks for your answers and a promising piece of SW! :-)

Martin