NFM Home Page

NFM is the name of a new file manager that I am currently developing. It is intended to implement a very flexible, asynchronous file manager suitable for many versions of UNIX.

My previously written File Manager, "FileMan" is can be found here - it can be seen as the basis on which I intend to improve on.

Current Status  
30th January, 2000. Second code release available - as before, this is for the curious only - you can only perform limited navigation of the available types, and of course, bugs, bugs, bugs...

It now has a "quick abort" button, views default to "detailed" view (can not change via interface as yet), incremental window painting will also work in this view. Added a right mouse button pop-up menu - shows whatever options the Mime type for that particular object does - not hooked up to a valid handler yet - this is next week!

 
Documentation  
30th January, 2000.
Architecture An overall architecture document, explaining some of the basic concepts of NFM.
Handling Mime How the file manager handles MIME data from the "mimed" process.
 
ScreenShots  
22nd January, 2000.

Look!!

The initial screen shots have been added to with a shot showing the mounted file systems, and navigating a real file system.
 
Code Release  
20000130 A snapshot of the source code directory tree - requires tcl 8.2 to run. To actually try out the code use the following instructions;

mkdir /tmp/nfm_20000130

cd /tmp/nfm_20000130

[ -f /tmp/vfs_logfile ] && chmod 777 /tmp/vfs_logfile

tar xvzf /tmp/20000130.tgz

export NFM_HOME=$PWD/nfm

nfm/bin/nfm

Of course, you will require a valid DISPLAY. The GUI should pop up once it has assigned its ports for this session. Currently the various daemons are launched in xterm windows for debugging purposes... Enjoy!!

 
Weekly Status Report  
30th January, 2000 Although there may not be much visible progress, things are developing quite rapidly. The VFS handling function have been changed significantly from the original set - and will of course continue to change as development continues - this is the beauty of using a component based approach.

The view now appears in veritical mode - known as the "detailed" view. Notice that the details will change depending on the object type in question.

The basic handling for "retrieving" an object has been written for "local" files - the code for tar archives will be added this week. This is the first step of actually performing a "double-click" type action on the object.

Also the GUI now supports a right-click on objects in the file window - this produces a pop-up menu with options suitable for that object. The actions do not work yet - but hopefully that will come soon as well!!

 

Older Status Reports  
22nd January, 2000 Well, it has been a couple of weeks from the last "weekly" report. Despite this work has continued on the VFS architecture, GUI interface and other aspects.

 

GUI
  • Now works with multiple windows - no limit on number of windows.
  • "Clever" Large Directory Handling - more on this next week! Basically, only draws icons/files that you can see at the moment - which makes it much faster than many file managers when handling large directories.
VFS
  • Added real file systems to "My UNIX Machine" (see screen shots)
  • Added a "tar" VFS - for .tar and .tgz - more extensions to follow.
MIME
  • Added object type handling.
  • Added object match caching for improved performance .