LXDE Forums

A couple of days ago I had a chance to try out PCManFM 1.2.0 in a live session of SliTaz rolling (which is still under development). I was impressed by its stability and its snappy operation but there are some issues and design choices I wasn't not so happy about:

- pull-down menus are only useful when there are at least 3 or more options to choose from. Using a pull-down menu to choose between Location view and Directory Tree view in the left pane makes switching between the views unnecessarily cumbersome. A simple toggle button in the toolbar at the top would have been better. I wouldn't even mind if the "open/close Side Pane" button had 3 states, so one could click through the Location/Tree/Off states of the pane. But I guess, that's a matter of taste ...

- vertical dotted lines in the Directory Tree view of the left pane are incredibly helpful when navigating through deep directory structures. What may look like clutter to some is actually very useful and shouldn't have been removed from the 0.5.x branch of the FM.

- in the detailed list view of the right pane the Permission and the Owner:Group columns are still missing. I do hope these important columns will be back in a future version of the FM.

- and lastly, I never cared much for the dumbed-down and convoluted way Nautilus, Thunar and others use to edit file and directory permissions and I'm disappointed to see that PCManFM now uses the same silly pull-down menus for this task. I always thought that the permissions window of the 0.5.x series was brilliantly simple and intuitive to use. Is there any chance we might get this back in a future version of PCManFM? (... that is, if enough people agree with me on this).

PCManFM being a very light FM may or may not have exactly what you want in a FM. Unfortunately, this forum is not really the place to make a request for a chance. The developers rarely if ever visit the site. However, if you have a request for a feature then the place to go is
http://sourceforge.net/p/pcmanfm/feature-requests/
I know it is a pain but that is how they got it organized. I just thought that I would pass this information on to you if you were not aware of it.

Thanks for your reply, Rex. I will definitely post a feature request on PCMan's SourceForge pages. But first I have to get an account there ...

The current Sparky Linux upgrade includes Pcmanfm 1.2.0. It is good to see the developers working again after the long rest. The dual pain view is great. Losing "open this folder as root" is a backword step, but easily remediable. You can use the "open current folder in terminal" tool, which is clumsy, or simply put a copy of the pcmanfm.desktop file (found in /usr/share/applications) into /home/me/.local/share/applications/ after changing the exec to "gksu pcmanfm" and renaming it something like "pcmanfm-root". The latter should then be on the right click list to open folders. Similar "root-text" editors and root-image" editors can be created.

About "dotted lines" - you should go to the PCManFM tracker and write a feature request. The forum is not a place for that, seriously.

About the Permission and the Owner columns - just right-click on the header and add them.

About permissions - you overestimate people and think everyone understand all the illegal combinations of bits. But you are wrong and you have no idea how many questions we got from people why those permissions they set don't work. I'm sorry but this appearance was created exactly to avoid errors and it was discussed with developers for long enough time to get the best results - simple to understand and error-proof.

pull-down menus are only useful when there are at least 3 or more options to choose from. Using a pull-down menu to choose between Location view and Directory Tree view in the left pane makes switching between the views unnecessarily cumbersome. A simple toggle button in the toolbar at the top would have been better. I wouldn't even mind if the "open/close Side Pane" button had 3 states, so one could click through the Location/Tree/Off states of the pane. But I guess, that's a matter of taste ..