[rox-devel] ROX-Filer 2.0.0!

[Thomas L. <ta...@ec...>]

ROX-Filer 2.0.0, the first release of the new stable series, is now
available for download:

	http://rox.sourceforge.net/rox_download.html

I've put up source tarballs and binaries for GTK+-2.0 and 2.2. The 2.0
binary is compiled against an older version of glibc too.


Changes since 1.2.0:


There are three big changes in this release. The biggest is that the
filer now uses GTK+-2.0 (or 2.2) rather than 1.2. This is a major
change, bringing many benefits, especially in the areas of text handling
and appearance. However, it is also quite a lot slower than before.
Therefore, it is unlikely that the filer will run well on 486-type
machines, even though the filer itself shouldn't be less efficient than
before. It is also reported to be sluggish on a P-90, but is perfectly
usable on a P-333. The speed may depend on your graphics card too.

The new version of GTK brings support for the new X font system, which
provides good-looking (optionally) anti-aliased fonts. It also uses a
sane font naming scheme (eg "Bitstream Vera Sans 10") rather than the
previous system of random dashes, digits and stars. All modern Linux
distros have this already set up, but if you're doing it manually, check
the ROX FAQ entry on fonts ("Why don't my fonts don't look as good as
the ones in the screenshots?").

The new GTK also uses double-buffering for drawing, which means that
there shouldn't be any flickering when resizing windows, etc.


The second major change is to character encodings. Briefly: your
computer uses numbers to represent characters (eg, 65 is 'A' in the ASCII
encoding). Most other encodings extend ASCII with various accented
characters or other symbols, but different systems use the same numbers
for different letters, and each can only represent a particular
alphabet. The effect of this is that you're forced to choose a single
encoding for your whole system, but if you choose an encoding that, for
example, does Greek characters, then you can't have any Chinese
characters on your system, etc.

Obviously, this is very silly, and the solution is the UTF-8 encoding,
which has a different number for every character in every known
language. The plan (not just for ROX) is to move everything across to
UTF-8 as soon as possible so these problems go away. However, this 
may require a little work if you're currently using a different
encoding. People using plain ASCII (no accented characters) are
unaffected, since UTF-8 only extends ASCII. See the FAQ entry for more
information ("Why does the filer complain that my filenames aren't
UTF-8?").


The third likely cause of complaints is the new pinboard. As with the
encodings, we've moved over to a better system but it's going to annoy
people who've got things set up for the old one. The old system involved
creating lots of small 'shaped' windows, one for each icon. However,
this doesn't work on GTK+-2, and it was causing lots of problems anyway.
Also, different desktops were each implementing desktop icons
differently and it was hard for window managers to support them all.
Therefore the new window manager specification from freedesktop.org
suggests that everyone uses a single large window for icons, and this is
what GNOME, KDE, XFCE and ROX are all now doing.

This means:

- It's better looking (icons and text can 'blend' with the backdrop at
  the edges, giving smoother outlines).

- All window managers can support all desktops (although some are still
  in the process of being converted).

- ROX-Filer is now in charge of the desktop background image (though
  using the pinboard in the first place is still optional, of course).
  This makes it easier for new users to set the backdrop, but means
  that people with cron-jobs using xsetroot, etc, need to update them.

The filer already provides a drop-box for setting a centred, scaled,
tiled or stretched image as the backdrop. It also provides an interface
to let other programs set the backdrop. In particular, the Wallpaper
application (http://rox.sourceforge.net/wallpaper.html) can choose a
random backdrop when you login and change it at regular intervals too.
It can also use the output of another program (such as ImageMagick or
XEarth) for the backdrop. See the FAQ entry for more information
("Can I make the pinboard transparent, like in the 1.2.x series?").

Note: I get a number of emails about this in the form "Hi, I think
you're wrong about it not being feasible to use the old method for
pinboard icons. It's actually really easy, and you should change it. I'd
do it myself, except I'm not a programmer and I don't know how."
If you feel tempted to write such an email, I suggest either learning to
program first or finding a programmer willing to produce a prototype
that we can discuss (note: solution must work on all X servers, be fast,
still support the current scheme, which is better for most people, and
be reasonably maintainable... good luck).


As well as the pinboard following the new window manager standard,
better interoperability can be seen in several other areas. In
particular, we support the new thumbnails specification, which allows
sharing thumbnails with Gimp, Nautilus, etc, and we have merged the ROX,
GNOME and KDE MIME databases to produce a single shared database (which
GNOME and KDE are currently adding support for).

The user interface is now simpler and cleaner. In particular,
drag-and-drop now defaults to opening a menu of operations, clicking on
mount points defaults to mounting and the options box is far less
confusing. We have also adopted the new GNOME button ordering for dialog
boxes, which places the 'Yes, do it!' button in the bottom-right corner
of all boxes (Mac style).

Other notable new features are the bookmarks menu, including a list of
recently visiting directories, and the ability to set global short-cuts
for any pinboard or panel icon (eg, start your web-browser or open a
directory with a shortcut, even when using another program).


List of changes since the 1.2.x series:


DEPENDANCIES

- The rox-base package is no longer needed.

- gtk-pixbuf is no longer needed (now part of GTK+).

- Uses GTK+-2.0 or later.

- Uses Shared MIME Database.


FILER WINDOWS

- Clicking on a mount point auto-mounts. The shift action is now to open
  without mounting. Closing a filer window showing a mount point offers to
  unmount it.

- Added dnotify support, so that on Linux the filer now updates
  automatically when a directory is changed (without waiting for you to
  move the pointer over it).

- Increase time between updates while scanning from 0.5s to 1.5s. Now that
  the names are all shown from the start, fast feedback here is less
  useful.

- Alt-Return or Alt-Button-1 on a file works like clicking with button-2;
  it opens a directory in a new window and closes the directory when
  opening a file.

- Don't convert to `real' path when following symlinks, so that Up now
  returns to the directory containing the symlink, not the thing it linked
  to. Added 'Follow Symbolic Links' menu item to get the old behaviour.

- Use bold style to indicate recent items.

- New 'Short titlebar flags' option.

- The Path Entry minibuffer now highlights invalid paths in red, instead of
  beeping.

- Option to switch automatically between Large and Small icons,
  depending on the number of files in the directory.


TOOLBARS

- New button to set automatic size mode (see above).

- Make toolbar extend the whole width of the window.

- Added 'Text beside icon' toolbar style.


ACTION WINDOWS

- Added Newer option for Copy and Move operations.

- Display action window questions in bold.

- Place action windows under pointer.

- Aborting an action window tries to kill all child processes, not just
  the immediate child, and doesn't close the window until it has actually
  stopped.


APPEARANCE

- New icon for the filer.

- Support for new font system -- this means much better looking text and
  sensible font names.

- Informational messages are now shown with the info icon, not the error
  symbol.

- Set collection style in the program. Choices/ROX-Filer/Styles is no longer
  used.

- Flicker free redraw of everything, due to double-buffering.

- Support for GTK stock icons (better looking defaults and more
  themeable).

- Converted dialog boxes to new, much better, style.

- Fully converted to use PNG format images. Uses alpha-blending
  everywhere, allowing smooth edges to icons and semi-transparency.

- Improved highlighting of icons.

- Allow panel style to be set from ~/.gtkrc-2.0, using 'rox-panel' to
  identify the window.

- Use better text wrapping system.

- Make the Find and Permissions help windows look nicer.

- Don't scale icons up in Huge mode.

- Added icon to infobox.

- Much improved layout for Options box. Changes to options now take
  effect instantly. The old Apply button is gone, and Cancel is now
  Revert.


MENUS

- Rearraged File menu.

- Added Help menu with both About and Show Files entries, and a new entry
  to load the corrent manual for the current locale.

- Open the menu on the 'popup-menu' signal. Allows you to use the default
  GTK keyboard shortcuts to open the menu.

- Use stock icons in menus.

- Move Xterm Here to Window menu and add Switch to xterm.


INTERACTION WITH OTHER PROGRAMS

- Allow COMPOUND_TEXT target for pinboard and panels (allows pasting into
  gnome-terminal).

- Slightly adjusted the 'normal' icon height to be the same size as GNOME's
  to make sharing icons easier.

- Updated install script to use new XDG Base Directory spec.

- Close stdout when running child processes for users running startx from the
  console, since some terminal applications try to read from the console,
  freezing X.

- Forward scroll events on pinboard to window manager, and add option to
  workaround *box issues.

- Replace -o command-line option with a check box in the options window.


SORTING

- Sorting handles numbers in a sensible way, so that 'file10' comes
  after 'file9', etc.

- The 'Directories always come first' option now only applies to name sorts.

- Added Sory by Group and Sort by User.

- Sort by date and size default order has been reversed.

- Sort order can be reversed.

- Removed 'Ignore case' option, replacing it with 'Capitalised names first'.


SEND TO MENU

- Allow subdirectories in the Send To menu.

- Allow hidden subdirectories in <Choices>/SendTo which have their
  contents included only for certain MIME types.


PINBOARD AND PANELS

- New panel style. Better looking, and sensitive right up to the edge of the
  screen.

- New option to set the pinboard font.

- Auto-raise panels when the pointer hits the side of the screen, and lower
  when it leaves the panel.

- Make panel menus appear nearer the edge of the screen for top, left and
  right panels.

- New option to set the panel size.

- Scroll panels when the pointer is at the end, not by dragging the middle.

- Set _WIN_HINTS for pinboard and panel icons so that they don't appear on
  task-lists or get selected when Alt-Tabbing.

- Use a single screen-sized window (faster and better looking).

- Iconified windows can be shown on the pinboard. There are options to
  set the layout policy.

- Setting the backdrop is now done by the filer, from the pinboard menu.

- Always use button-3 for the pinboard menu, as the window manager menu
  must be on button-2.

- Allow multiple pinboard icons to be selected by dragging a box around
  them.

- Allow multiple pinboard icons to be repositioned at once.

- Pinboard and panel icons can now have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them.

- Added support for shadowed labels on the pinboard.

- Draw iconified windows with a background, so they don't get confused with
  other icons.

- Pinboard image style Scale is now called Stretch; Scale now scales
  without changing the aspect ratio.


THUMBNAILS

- Large (over 50K) image files are now loaded in a subprocess. Faster, less
  likely to crash due to bad images, and more responsive.

- Create thumbnails at 128x128 to be in-line with current thumbnails spec.

- Added button in options window to purge thumbnails cache.


INTERNATIONALISATION

- Complete switch to UTF-8 everywhere.

- Filenames which are not valid UTF-8 are shown in red. A tooltip explains the
  problem. CHARSET is used to try and render the name anyway, and the rename
  box can be used to fix it.

- Allow xml:lang attribute in AppInfo files for translations; see
  ROX-Filer/AppInfo.xml for an example.

- Allow translation of About AppInfo section.

- In translated <About> sections in AppInfo.xml files, allow a 'label='
  attribute to translate the key.

- Message in translation options switches language as you move through the
  options.


NEW TRANSLATIONS

- Added Chinese translation.

- Added Danish translation.

- Added Japanese translation.

- Added Norwegian translation.

- Added Swedish translation.


SOAP

- Added PanelAdd and PinboardAdd SOAP methods.

- Added Sort to the OpenDir SOAP method.

- SOAP method OpenDir now allows Style and Details to be specified.

- New 'Class' parameter to Filer_OpenDir SOAP method allows setting the
  WM_CLASS of a new window so that the window manager can treat it
  specially, such as opening it in a certain place, or make it sticky.


DRAG AND DROP

- Dragging to the Home and Up toolbar tools now supports the menu-on-drag
  option.

- Option to show menu on button-1 drags instead of copying.

- Removed confusing Set Icon choice from DnD menu.

- Allow dragging a file into a text entry field (including in other
  applications) to insert the filename.

- Use XSettings for drag-and-drop threshold.

- Merged Set Run Action, Set Icon and Set Backdrop dropboxes into a single
  Ultimate DropBox widget, and made all three interfaces much nicer.


TYPES

- MIME information is now read from the freedesktop.org shared database
  rather than the old Choices/MIME-info directories. The KDE and GNOME
  desktops have both agreed to switch to this database too.

- Include textual description of types in various places.

- Using the Edit MIME types button in the Options window opened the
  old directory. Refer people to the MIME-Editor application instead.

- Removed Re-read MIME types button. Use Refresh on the toolbar instead.

- Added support for Solaris 'Door' files.

- Added a default hander for HTML files, otherwise newbies can't read the
  manual!


BOOKMARKS

- Added Bookmarks feature. Directories can be added, edited, removed and
  rearranged.

- Allow dragging directories to bookmarks edit window or toolbar icon,
  with spring loading.

- Added Bookmarks 'Recently Visited' submenu.


AUTOSIZING

- When resizing due to a key event, warp the pointer (for sloppy focus
  users).

- Attempt to improve the autosizing by examining the item with the longest
  name.

- Mounting and unmounting auto-resizes the window.


OTHERS

- The Info box for an application now has a new 'Show Help Files'
  button.

- When setting the icon for a directory, provide an option to create a
  .DirIcon file.

- The Link box allows an existing symlink to be replaced, instead of
  complaining that the destination already exists.

- Added a second display style: List View.

- Add GTK versions used for compiling and running to -v output (suggested
  by Vincent Lefere).


Many thanks to the huge number of people who contributed code, icons,
translations, packages, suggestions and bug reports to this release!


Enjoy :-)


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
ta...@ec...		ta...@us...
GPG: 9242 9807 C985 3C07 44A6  8B9A AE07 8280 59A5 3CC1