Gnome Commander

A powerful file manager for the GNOME desktop environment

The Gnome Commander team is proud to announce the release of Gnome Commander v1.6.0. The new version comes with a number of new features and bugfixes after nearly 690 commits.

The maintainer would like to thank all the people who contributed to this release, especially to Dmitry, Martin and Eric. A big ‘Thank you!’ goes also to the translators, especially the ones from the Gnome translation teams. You did a great job in the past months!

Below you will find a list of all changes and a closer look at some of the new features.

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List of new features

• Configurable command for sending files to a preferred application
• Button ‘Edit files’ accepts more than one selected file at the same time
• Device buttons and device list entries act as ‘home buttons’ for that device
• Copy directory path to clipboard after right click on dir-indicator
• Show/hide mainmenu can be set as keyboard shortcut
• Simple plug-in system for file context menu
• Display of application icons in the ‘Open With’ popup menu
• Write bookmark changes immediately to file, sync bookmarks between all instances
• File Roller plugin can use prefix patterns using strftime when generating the archive name
• Storage of options is done in the dconf database now instead of a gnome-config file
• Devices and fav-apps are now stored within the GKeyFile format
• Reopen the same options dialog tab which was previously closed in the current session
• New colour theme ‘Winter’

Other changes

• Removed ‘Open folder’ command in popup menu and user actions
• Started usage of google test framework for unit tests
• Samba support is now optional via configure option
• Code cleanup

List of bug fixes

• Fixed bgo#671616 (Right-Mouse popup menu is displayed in wrong position)
• Fixed bgo#683087 (Crash opening properties window on certain objects)
• Fixed bgo#742752 (Made options dialog resizable and added scrollbars)
• Fixed bgo#767158 (Shortcuts stop working after changing layout)
• Fixed bgo#770062 (Memory leak in GnomeCmdPlainPath)
• Fixed bgo#770063 (Memory leak in get_string_pixel_size)
• Preserve focused file after renamed with AdvRenDialog
• Fixed string escaping for directories with ampersand (see bgo#769309)

New or updated translations:

• bs (Samir Ribic)
• ca (Jordi Mas)
• cs (Marek Černocký)
• de (Mario Blättermann, Wolfgang Stöggl)
• es (Daniel Mustieles)
• eu (Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio)
• fi (Lasse Liehu)
• fr (Alexandre Franke)
• hu (Balázs Meskó, Balázs Úr)
• id (Andika Triwidada)
• lt (Zygimantus)
• nb (Kjartan Maraas)
• oc (Cédric Valmary)
• pl (Piotr Drąg)
• pt (Pedro Albuquerque)
• pt_BR (Rafael Fontenelle)
• ro (Jobava)
• sk (Dušan Kazik, Tibor Kaputa)
• sl (Matej Urbančič)
• sr (Мирослав Николић)
• sr@latin (Мирослав Николић)
• sv (Anders Jonsson, Josef Andersson)
• tr (Necdet Yücel)

New or updated docs

• cs (Daniel Mustieles, Marek Černocký)
• de (Christian Kirbach, Mario Blättermann)
• el (Dimitris Spingos, Maria Mavridou)
• es (Daniel Mustieles)

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Details

Configurable ‘Send files’ command

The ‘Send files’ command is now configurable in the Programs tab of the Gnome Commander options. The default value is set to nautilus-sendto %s.

Personally, I like to send my mail via mutt, so my preferred send-to command is
gnome-terminal -e "mutt -a %s". Have fun to add your own cool command.

Copy path name from directory indicator

When you right click on a part of the directory indicator, the path up to the position of the mouse cursor is copied.

In the example above, /home/uwe/Programmieren/Projekte can be pasted from the clipboard after right-clicking.

Show/hide mainmenu

The user action ‘Display main menu’ is a now available at the Settings->Keyboard Shortcuts tab:

The shortcut is initially set to F12 but you can choose your own hotkey, too. Hint: Its fancy to start GCMD without any disruptive menu widgets. Just try it out and have even more space for your file panes, yeah!

Simple plug-in system for file context menu

Now you can extend the file context menu even more easily then before. Here is an example with four additional entries:

How does it work?

• Create the directory ~/.gnome-commander/scripts/

• Create a script file here with an arbitrary name. A simple example:
  
  #!/bin/sh
#name: Make tar gz
tar -cf archive.tar.gz $@ -z
  

• Save it and open the file context menu in GCMD. ‘Make tar gz’ is a new entry now.
• Each script can have the following properties, defined in the script header:
  • name - the name of the menu item. If not set, use the filename of the script.
  • term - run the script in a terminal window if set to true.
• Property format: #[property]: [value]
• If you press the Shift key, the script will be called for each selected file separately. Otherwise, the list of files will be transmitted to the script as a list of arguments.
• Sample scripts can be found here

Display of application icons in the ‘Open With’ popup menu

In the past it wasn’t possible to see the application icons in the ‘Open With’ section of the popup menu. Now, this is possible. Again, an example picture is worth a thousand words:

If you don’t see icons after the GCMD upgrade, it might be because of a setting in the gconf configuration. You have to set the flag /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons flag to true. For this use the command: gconftool-2 --type boolean --set "/desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons" "true" or use gconf editor.

Usage of strftime patterns in the File Roller plugin

In the configuration dialog of the File Roller plugin it is possible now to set a global filename prefix pattern for newly created archives. Replacement of strftime strings is supported, which is convenient when you periodically create archives and want their filenames to contain the current date. In the figure below a screenshot of the File Roller plugin options is shown with an example of the current year, month and date in the filename.

Patterns from strftime always begin with a percent sign and will be replaced by the plugin when creating a new archive. The string $N will be replaced by the name of the original file or folder to be archived. All other characters will remain.

Usage of dconf instead of gnome-config

Most program options have been stored at ~/.gnome2/gnome-commander and ~/.gnome2/gnome-commander-size in the past. For doing so the outdated ‘gnome-config’ library was used.

When you boot GCMD v1.6.0 the first time now, all the settings in these files are automatically transfered into your local dconf database, the configuration system of GNOME 3. The config files in ~/.gnome2/ are then renamed to ~/.gnome2/xxx.deprecated. You can delete them safely when you feel everything went fine.

All GCMD options can be graphically displayed and set in the dconf-editor (see the image below) at the path org.gnome.gnome-commander. Changing a setting there will have immediate effect in a running GCMD session for most of these options. Of course, changing settings from inside GCMD will still work.

There exists also an xml-config file in ~/.gnome-commander/gnome-commander.xml. Options stored there are not affected by the update in any way.

Usage of gkeyfile for devices and favourite apps

When GCMD v1.6.0 is started the first time, all favourite applications and all devices stored in ~/.gnome-commander/fav-apps and ~/.gnome-commander/devices created in previous GCMD versions are converted into a key-value format using GKeyFile. This file format is much more human readable compared to the self-made format in previous versions. Backup files are copied to ~/.gnome-commander/fav-apps.deprecated and ~/.gnome-commander/devices.deprecated. These files can be deleted later on.

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