2003-12-22 Emil Brink gentoo: Frequently Asked Questions 0. INTRODUCTION This file contains some frequently asked questions, and their answers, about the X11/GTK+ file manager "gentoo". None of these questions are actual, verbatim, questions asked by users. They've all been constructed by me, around questions and wishes sent to me by gentoo's users. Q1. Does gentoo support drag-and-drop ("DnD") ? A1: No, it currently does not. This is definitely the #1 most asked for feature. However, there are some issues with it that makes me hesitate in implementing it: 1. Should DnD be between gentoo and other applications (e.g. xmms), and/or in gentoo internally? What should gentoo do if you drag a file from a desktop's file manager and drop it in one of gentoo's panes? Supporting DnD internally would require a pretty pretty hefty amount of internal rewriting. :( 2. Getting the GtkCList widget (which is what the panes in gentoo are implemented with) to support DnD without losing the possibility to drag to select multiple items seems difficult. I am not willing to sacrifice the multi-selection. Q2: How can I make the font used in file listings bigger? A2: By creating and editing the .gentoogtkrc file. See the README.gtkrc for further instructions. Q3: Compiling gentoo fails because <errno.h> doesn't exist or has problems, what's up? A3: You have an incorrectly or incompletely installed C compiler. On some Linux varieties, you need to "make dep" in the Linux kernel sources, since <errno.h> relies on kernel headers. Q4: What about a port to GTK+ 2.0? It's out, you know... A4: Yeah, I know. And no, I don't expect a port to be out any time soon. For the following reasons: 1. GTK+ 2 is slow. It's unhurrying, slow-going, slow-paced, leaden, sluggish, and generally unhasty. This has two direct consequences: it makes me not want to work with it, since it's simply less fun, and it makes me worry about ruining gentoo's reputation of being a quick file manager. Perhaps it's all my fault, for running it on such a slow machine, but I have problems understanding the 10X slowdown compared to 1.2.x. I just don't want to. I love the speed of 1.2.x! 2. Differences. GTK+ 2 is largely reworked compared to the 1.2 series, many of the main widgets gentoo rely on (such as the GtkCLists used for the panes) are deprecated. Porting gentoo to native, current, GTK+ 2 widgets could be a lot of work. 3. Spiral effect. If I get started redoing core parts of the application, that could be contagious and I might end up re- designing major parts of it. Which would be fun and good, but could take up a lot of time. Especially considering all the time I'd have to spend waiting for GUI redraws. Did I mention there's a performance problem with GTK+ 2? Q5. I get a weird warning about case sensitivity and ASCII?! A5. Yes. This indicates that you have successfully built gentoo in a localizable manner. It also indicates that gentoo has performed tests on your host's strcoll(3) string comparison function, and is letting you know of any limitations found. Q6. The selection mouse handling is all weird, why can't it just behave like the rest of the world does it? A6. It behaves in the way it does since that's how DirOpus on the Amiga did it, and the author happens to like being able to click and drag and always add to the selection without having to touch the keyboard. If you disagree, change the "Modify 'Control' Key State" dirpane setting to "System Default". Q7. What is "Click-M-Click"? It doesn't do anything?! Aargh! A7. Sure it does, but it is a bit sneaky and hard to find by "mistake". Basically, it's a simple mouse gesture. It stands for "click, then move, and click again". It triggers if you click a file in one pane, then move the mouse to the other pane and click again, all within a pre-set time limit. It is useful for accessing frequently used commands in a way that is more rapid(-feeling, at least) than using a pop-up menu or even a keyboard shortcut. For example, by binding it to archive extraction, you can extract an archive by just clicking twice with a bit of (precise) mouse movement in between. Note that Click-M-Click acts like a single global event, which you can only bind to one action (on the "Controls" configuration page). To get type-specific things to happen, just bind it to the FileAction command using e.g. "FileAction action=cmc" and then define custom "cmc" Actions in the appropriate Styles. Q8. How do I set the background color of the panes? The bright white is hurting my eeeyes! A8. You need to go through the .gentoogtkrc file, and set the "base" element in a style which then gets used by the "*mainPane0" and "*mainPane1" widgets. See this page for more details: http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/gtk/gtk-resource-files.html. Q9. Any further questions? A9. No, it doesn't seem so. If you disagree, get in touch.