Arox User Manual

https://www.absolutelinux.org/arox_manual.html

Conditions

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA, 02111-1307, USA.

Abstract

Arox is a graphical file manger for the X Window System. Its user interface is based on the RISC OS filer and it supports similar features such as drag-and-drop loading and saving of files. (For instance, drag a link from a web page, and arox will copy the file to where you dragged it...)

Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents

Features

Arox is a simple and easy to use graphical file manager for X11 -- the windowing system used on Unix and Unix-like operating systems. [Arox]. Many of the arox's features were inspired by RISC OS [RISC OS]. `ROX' stands for `RISC OS-On-X'.

Features

XDND: A common drag-and-drop protocol used, for example, by the GNOME desktop[GNOME]. This allows data to be loaded into an application by dragging it from a filer window to a program. The full specification is given in [DND].
XDS: An extension to XDND that allows applications to save data by dragging an icon back to a filer window. The full specification is given in [XDS].
Basedir spec: A simple, but flexible, system for managing user choices. By default, choices are saved under `~/.config'. However, you can change this by setting the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable. See [BaseDir] for details.
Thumbnails: The filer can be made to display image files by using the image itself for the icon, instead of a generic `this-is-an-image' icon. Very useful for organising a directory full of photos! See [Thumbs] for details.
Shared MIME Info Database: In the past, each desktop had its own database of rules for determining the type of files. The Shared MIME Info Database[SharedMIME] unifies these into a single system shared by all desktops.
Icon Themes: Collections of file icons, called themes, can be installed (eg, to `~/.icons'). You can switch between themes in the Options box. Once other desktops support this fully, themes will be sharable between desktops. See [IconTheme] for details.
DNotify support (Linux only): If used with a recent Linux kernel (2.4.x series), the filer will notice changes to directories automatically. On other systems, directories will update when the pointer is moved over them.

Chapter 2. The menus

Table of Contents

The display menu

Permissions

Showing different applications for different types

The bookmarks menu

By default, you can open a menu by right clicking over a pinboard, panel or filer window. In filer windows, you may also press \ to open the menu. As a shortcut, you can open the File submenu directly by holding down the Control key when opening the menu. Here is a full description of each menu item:

Entry	Action
Display	Change the display settings.
File	Operations on the selected items.
Next Click	Handy for mouse-centric users. Only available when mouse clicks on blank area.
Select	Control which items are selected.
Options...	Configure arox.
New	Create a new file or subdirectory inside this directory.
Window	Operations on the window as a whole.
Help	Information about the filer.

The display menu

Entry	Action
Icons View	Files are displayed as rows of icons.
Icons, With...	Files are displayed as rows of icons with additional details (chosen from the submenu). To see fuller information about each file use the List View instead.
List View	Show files in a list along with their details. Click on a column heading to sort by that column.
Bigger Icons	Increase the size of the icons. Turns off Automatic mode.
Smaller Icons	Reduce the size of the icons. Turns off Automatic mode.
Automatic	Select a sensbile icon size automatically now and when changing directory, etc.
Sort by XXX	Set the sort mode. In List View you can also set the sort type by clicking on the column headings.
Reversed	Sort in reverse order (newest to oldest, largest to smallest, etc).
Show Hidden	If on, files beginning with a dot are shown, otherwise they are hidden. The titlebar shows (All) when this is on.
Show Thumbnails	When on, the filer tries to load every image file and use that image as the file's icon. Useful if you have a directory full of photos and can't remember which is which! See the Thumbnails section for details.
Refresh	Rereads the contents of the directory and details of all the files in it. Use this if the display becomes out-of-date.
Refresh Thumbs	...you guessed it.

Permissions

The permissions field, when shown, is made up of four groups of three flags. Each flag is displayed as a letter if it is on and a dash (Ã¢ÂÂ) if not. The first three characters show the permissions for the owner of the file, the second for other members of the file's group and the third for everyone else. Whichever group applies to the ROX-Filer process itself is shown underlined. The fourth group shows any special flags.

The meanings of the characters are:

r -- Permission to read the contents of a file, or the names of files in a directory.
w -- Permission to alter the contents of a file, or change which names appear in a directory.
x -- Permission to run the file as a program, or refer to the files listed within the directory.
U -- This program executes with the effective user ID of its owner rather than the person who ran it.
G -- This program executes with the effective group ID of its group, regardless of who ran it.
T -- Entries in this directory can only be altered or removed by the people who own the files even if they have write permission on the directory itself.

For example,

      rwx,rwx,r-x/---

means that the owner of the file is the same as the effective user of ROX-Filer (basically, you own the file), you and members of the file's group have read, write and execute permission and other people have only read and execute permission. There are no special flags set. The rules which determine which permissions apply may vary slightly between operating systems, but a rough guide is:

If the effective user ID of the process is equal to the file's owner, then the owner permissions apply.
Otherwise, if the effective group ID of the process is equal to the file's group OR the file's group is one of the process's supplemental groups then the group permissions apply.
Otherwise, the `other' permissions apply. The real user ID and real group ID have no effect (except that a process may set its real IDs to its effective IDs).

The file menu

All of these work in the same way -- if you open the menu with some items selected then the operation applies to those items. If you open then menu over an item while there is no selection then that item is temporarily selected.

If you choose one of these while there is no selection at all then the window goes into `target mode'; the operation happens to the next item you click on. Click on the window background, press Escape, or click with the right mouse button to cancel target mode. Target mode is mainly useful with the Single-click navigation option and keys bound to the various menu entries.

Note that individual applications may add extra menu items to the top of this submenu when you click over them -- see Application directories for details. There may also be any number of user-defined actions at the top, which depend on the type of file clicked on. You can add programs here by choosing the Customise Menu item. For example, you could make The Gimp appear on the menu for images, and FreeFS appear for mount points.

Entry	Action
Copy...	Make a copy of this object.
Copy Here	Makes a copy of selected file in present folder. Pops up a copy-naming dialog.
Rename...	Change the name used for this object, or move it between directories. If multiple files are selected, this opens The Bulk Rename window.
Link...	Create a symbolic link to this name.
Delete	Remove all the selected entries from the directory. Subdirectories will have their contents deleted first. Deleting symlinks only removes the link, not the thing it points to.
Open as Text	Opens file with Scite text editor on Absolute Linux.
Send To...	Opens the `Send To' menu, allowing you to send the selected files to one of a list of applications. See the Send To menu section.
Set Run Action...	Allows you to set the default program to use when opening files of this type. See the Set Run Action box section for details.
Set Icon...	You can give each file or directory its own special icon using this feature -- simply drag a suitable image onto the Set Icon box.
Copy Path	Copies the filesystem path of the file to the clipboard, including the filename. Especially handy to paste into an xterm, (via middle mouse button or Shift-Insert.)
Properties	Display extra information about this object. You can also change the access permissions from here (Permissions below allows you to change many files at once), and change the target to which a symlink points.
Count	Count the sizes of all the selected items. Directories also have their contents counted. Symlinks count themselves, not the things they point to.
Permissions	Allows you to change the permissions for the selected files. If only one file is to be changed, you can use Properties instead for a simpler interface.
Find	Search for files -- is a pyTk script written for Absolute.

Note about symlinks: A symbolic link stores the location of another file. Deleting the symlink doesn't affect the other file. Deleting the other file means that the symlink won't work. There are two types of symbolic link -- Relative and Absolute. An absolute link stores the path from the root directory to the target file (eg `/home/fred/MyFile'). A relative path stores the path from the symlink to the target (eg `../fred/MyFile'). If the target file is never going to move then you want an absolute link, but if the target may move (and the symlink will be moved with it) then you want a relative link.

The select menu

This menu allows you to select and unselect files in various ways. See the mouse and key bindings section for other ways to select files.

Entry	Action
Select All	Select every item in this window.
Clear Selection	Unselect every item in this window.

The new menu

Each entry in this submenu opens a savebox for creating a new file or directory. There are three standard entries; the others are the contents of your `~/.config/arox/Templates' directory, if it exists.

Entry	Action
Directory	Create a new directory.
File	Create a blank file.
Customise Menu	Open the ``Templates`' directory so that you can add extra items to the menu.
<user entries>	Copy a file from your Templates directory.

To add your own entries, choose Customise Menu and put any files you want in there. Each file in the directory will appear on the menu and the box that appears will copy it. For example, you could create a blank HTML file:

<html>
 <head>
  <title>My Page</title>
 </head>
 <body>
  The contents.
 </body>
</html>

Save this as `index.html' inside the `Templates' directory and you can easily create new HTML files. You can also save blank documents from various applications into here (eg, a blank spreadsheet, a blank letter, etc).

Note that you cannot set keyboard shortcuts for these user-defined entries at present.

The window menu

Entry	Action
Parent, New Window	Open a new window displaying this window's parent.
Parent, Same Window	As above, but reuse this window.
New Window	Open another window onto this directory.
Home Directory	Change to your home directory.
Show Bookmarks	Open the bookmarks menu (see Bookmarks menu).
Follow Symbolic Links	Converts the path shown in the window's titlebar to its canonical form. For example, if ``/home/fred/link`' is a symlink pointing to ``/usr/share/doc/`' then clicking on the symlink will take you to that directory and going `up' will take you back to ``/home/fred`'. If you'd used Follow Symbolic Links, you would have ended up in ``/usr/share`' instead.
Resize Window	Set the window to a sensible size for its contents.
Close Window	Close this window.

Terminal Here	Open an xterm with its current directory set to this directory.
Switch to Terminal	Open an xterm with its current directory set to this directory, and close the filer window at the same time.

The help menu

Entry	Action
About arox...	Display information about the file. This is the same as locating arox itself in a filer window and selecting Properties from the file menu.
Show Help Files	Same as selecting arox and choosing Help from the file menu.
Manual	Opens the HTML manual for your language, or the English version if there is no translation.

The send to menu

The `Send To' menu provides a quick way to send some files to an application. The filer scans all the `/etc/arox/SendTo' directories (see [BaseDir]) and lists the contents on this menu.

To change which applications appear here you should choose the Customise item from the bottom of the menu to create and open your own `SendTo' directory. Applications can be symlinked into this directory by dragging them in and choosing Link from the menu.

Opening the Send To menu via the main menu is rather slow, so it is normally opened by clicking the Menu mouse button over a file while holding the Shift key down.

Showing different applications for different types

You may want to set things up so that, for example, the Gimp is only shown when an image is selected. To do this, create a hidden directory inside `SendTo' called `.image', or whatever type you want to use. You can use either the complete type (eg `.image_png') or just the media type. Use Properties over a file to find out its MIME type.

Entries in these hidden directories are shown only for files of the appropriate type. If multiple files are selected, the `.group' directory is used instead.

The bookmarks menu

The bookmarks menu can be used to store a list of frequently used directories. You can also open the menu from the main popup menu (in the Window submenu) and you can use this to bind a shortcut key to it. From the bookmarks menu you can add the currently shown directory to the list, jump to one of the stored directories, or open a dialog letting you edit the list. In the dialog box, you can remove entries, rearrange them (using the arrows or by dragging) and edit the pathnames directly, if required.

The Recently Visited submenu shows the last few directories viewed. Choosing one will switch to that directory. The current directory is shown shaded, since you are already there.

Chapter 3. Mouse button and key bindings

Quick start:

Click the left ^[1] mouse button to open files and directories.
Click the right button to get a menu. Click over a file to perform an action on that file.
Drag files between windows with the left button to copy, move or link them (choose from a menu). Linking creates a shortcut to the original file.

By default, the mouse button bindings are designed to fit in with X conventions. However, the behaviour is highly configurable -- have a play in the Options window if you don't like the normal settings. The normal settings behave as follows:

Key or mouse button	Action
Left button click	Open the file or directory clicked on. Hold down Control to select things instead of opening them. Hold down Shift to look inside applications, treat files as text, follow symlinks, or get more control over mount points (see Removable devices).
Middle button click	Same as left click, but open a directory in a new window or close the viewer when opening a file.
Right button click	Open the main menu. Hold down Control while clicking to go directly to the Selection submenu. Hold down Shift to get the Send To menu (see the Send To menu section).
Drag an item (left mouse button)	Show a menu of possible actions. There is an option to disable this menu, in which case this gesture will copy the file(s) to the destination (an application or another filer window). Hold down Shift to move the file, Control+Shift to create a symbolic link, or Alt to get the menu of possible actions.
Drag an item (middle mouse button)	When you let go, display a menu of possible actions. There is an option to make this move the files rather than open the menu.
Drag (not over an item)	Select a group of items by dragging a box around them. With the left mouse button, only the files in the box will be selected. If you hold down Control then the boxed items are added to the selection. If you use the middle button then the boxed items switch between being selected and unselected.
Double-click background	Resize the window to a sensible size (this can be turned off from the Options window).
Backspace	Change to viewing the parent directory.
Cursor keys	Move the cursor around.
Page Up, Page Down	Move the cursor up and down a page at a time.
Home, End	Move to the first/last entry in the directory.
Return	Acts like clicking on the file. You may hold down Shift for other effects, as with clicking. Holding down Alt works like clicking with the middle button; directories open in a new window and opening files closes the directory at the same time.
Spacebar	Toggles the item under the cursor between being selected and unselected, and moves to the next item.
Tab, Shift+Tab	Moves the cursor to the next/previous selected item.
Hold mouse over an item	Shows a tooltip containing a brief description of an application (if available), the target of a symbolic link, and the full name of a file, if it's too long to show in the main window.

If you have user-defineable key-bindings enabled, then other keys can easily be set by opening the menu, moving the pointer over the item you want to use and pressing a key. The key will appear in the menu and can be used from then on. Key bindings are automatically saved when the filer quits.

^[1] This documentation assumes that button-1 is the left button, button-2 is the middle button and button-3 is the right button. This is not always the case -- for example, in a left-handed setup.

Chapter 4. Options

You can configure various aspects of arox from the Options box. Choose Options... from a filer window menu to open it. The list on the left of the window lists the various sections -- click on one to see its options. At the bottom of the window are two buttons:

OK saves the current choices into your `~/.config/arox' directory for next time arox is loaded, if anything changed. Exactly where choices are loaded from and saved to is controlled by the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable -- see [BaseDir] for details. Changes made in the Options box take effect instantly, so you don't need to click on OK just to try them out.
Revert Restores all choices to how they were when the options box was opened. This button is shown shaded if you haven't made any changes. The Options window is not closed when this is used.

The options in the Options window have tooltips explaining the use of each option -- hold the mouse pointer over an option to find out what it does.

Chapter 5. Filetypes

Table of Contents

The Set Run Action box

Setting the run action by drag-and-drop
Setting the run action by entering a shell command
Setting the default media-type handlers

The Set Icon box

How filetypes are stored

How the filer determines a file's type

All files have a MIME type in the form text/plain. Here, text is the media type and plain is the sub-type.

arox uses a file's name to decide what its MIME type is, and then uses the MIME type to decide what icon to give it and what program to use when you open the file.

The Set Run Action box

This box appears when you choose Set Run Action... from the File menu, and is used to set which application is loaded when you click on a file.

For example, let's say you want to set things up so that opening a `.gif' file loads it into the Gimp. First, right-click over a gif image to open the menu and choose Set Run Action... from the File submenu. Then, you have a choice of two methods to set the run action:

Setting the run action by drag-and-drop

Drag the Gimp (from a filer window, a panel or the pinboard) onto the area marked Drop a suitable application here. From now on, clicking on a GIF file will load it into the Gimp.

Setting the run action by entering a shell command

Type: gimp "$@" into the box labelled Enter a shell command and press Return. $@ will be replaced by the name of the file you click on when this command is used. As before, clicking on any GIF image will now load it into the Gimp.

Setting the default media-type handlers

Whichever method you use to set the action you have the choice of setting the run action just for that type, or setting the default for all files with that media-type which don't already have a specific action.

Since the Gimp can load many types of image, it makes sense to select the Set default for all `image/<anything>' option so you don't have to do it again for image/jpeg files and so on. However, this only affects types that don't already have a specific action (ie, those that would have brought up an error box if you tried to open them).

The Set Icon box

This box appears when you choose Set Icon... from the File menu, and is used to set which image to use to represent the file.

It works much like the Set Run Action box described above, except that you may specifiy an icon for one file individually (by name) as well as for all files of a particular type. When setting the icon for a single file, the filer stores the name of the file and the name of the icon inside your `~/.config/rox.sourceforge.net/MIME-icons' directory. If either moves, the icon won't be displayed.

When setting the icon for a directory, you have the additional option of storing the image inside the directory itself as a hidden file. This means that other users will see the icon too, and you can safely delete the original image after the copy (note that the image is scaled down if needed, and converted to PNG format).

The directory icon inside the Drop an icon here area allows you to quickly get to a directory from which you are already using one or more icons.

How filetypes are stored

arox uses two sub-directories in your `~/.config/rox.sourceforge.net' directory for filetypes:

`MIME-types'

contains symlinks, one for each MIME type, which point to programs that can handle files of that type. To set what program is run when you click on the file you should normally use the Set Run Action... feature (see the the Set Run Action box section). However, you can also set the actions manually -- for example, to make opening an HTML file load it into Netscape:

Find the Netscape application and go to Link... on the menu.
Enter text_html as the name for the link and drag the icon from the Link box into the `MIME-types' directory.

You can also put actual programs in here as well as links if you want to.

`MIME-icons'

contains the images used to display each type of file. So the filer will try to display an HTML file using the icon `MIME-icons/text_html.png'. If no icon is set here, the filer will use the currently selected icon theme (as set in the options box); see [IconTheme] for details.

In `MIME-types' you can also provide default actions for each media type. For example, if `text_html' isn't found then the filer will try simply using `text'.

How the filer determines a file's type

The filer usually works out the type for a file from its name. If this fails, it tries to guess from the file's contents. It is possible to override this guessing by setting an extended attribute on the file with the correct type, using the Set Type... menu item.

To edit the rules used to guess types, open the options box and go to the Types section. There is a button there that will launch the MIME-Editor application. You can also edit the rules manually -- see [SharedMIME] for details.

Chapter 6. Renaming files in bulk

If you have a large number of files to rename, it is tedious to rename them one by one. Instead, select all the files and choose Rename... from the menu to open the bulk rename window.

The window shows a table with two columns. The Old name column shows the current name of each selected file, and the New name column shows the new name, which is initially the same.

There are two ways to change the new names. You can edit the names in the table directly, or you can use the search and replace feature at the top of the window. This takes a regular expression to search for, and some text to replace matches with. For example, if you had a lot of files with names ending in `.htm' and you wanted to change them to use `.html', you would enter \.htm$ in the Replace: field and .html in the With: field. When you click Apply, the table is updated to show the proposed new names (but no actual renaming is done yet).

Having checked that the new names look OK, click on the Rename button to actually perform the rename operation.

Chapter 7. Removable devices

Device mounting on Absolute Linux is handled via udevil/devmon installed by spacefm.
Below is the rox-filer original documentation.

Using removable devices, such as floppy disks and CDROMs under arox is quite simple. However, it is important to understand about mounting and unmounting devices.

Mounting a device causes its contents to appear in the filesystem. On a typical setup, the directory `/floppy' is an empty directory on the hard disk. The floppy device is then mounted onto this directory, causing its contents to appear inside. For example, a file called `Letter' on the floppy disk will appear as `/floppy/Letter'.

Devices must be unmounted before the disk is removed. Unmounting causes the system to write any buffered data to the disk. If you remove a disk without unmounting it, it will probably be corrupted. CD and Zip drives often lock the tray while the device is mounted so you can't remove it accidentally.

So that you don't have to specify which device should be mounted at which point in the filesystem every time you want to use a disk, a preset list is usually found in the file `/etc/fstab'. arox shows mount points (such as `/floppy') which are listed here but not mounted with transparent grey circles overlayed on their icons.

Clicking on one of these mount points will mount the device for you. The circle turns green to indicate that the device is now mounted. Do not remove the device while the circle is lit! You can unmount the device by clicking while holding down Shift on the `/floppy' directory icon.

You can also unmount a device by closing its directory window (eg, closing the view of `/floppy') and choosing Unmount when prompted. The filer will only offer to unmount devices this way if they were mounted by the filer in the first place.

If you want to open a directory without mounting anything (eg, if you want to see the contents of `/floppy' on the hard disk), you can click on the unmounted mount point with Shift held down. This isn't usually useful, as these directories are typically empty.

Michael Adams	Thierry Godefroy	Christiansen Merel
Christopher Arndt	Olli Helenius	Jimmy Olgeni
Jens Askengren	Alex Holden	Richard Olsson
Liav Asseraf	Jasper Huijsmans	Matthew O'Phinney
Wilbert Berendsen	Sigve Indregard	Daniele Peri
Francesco Bochicchio	Bernard Jungen	Andy Piper
Yuri Bongiorno	Marcin Juszkiewicz	Marcelo Ramos
Andrzej Borsuk	James Kermode	Michel Alexandre Salim
Richard Boulton	Jim Knoble	Adam Sampson
Simon Britnell	Krzysztof Krzyzaniak	Chris Sawer
Arnaud Calvo	Aaron Kurtz	Christian Storgaard
Babyfai Cheung	Vincent Ledda	Taras
Andrew Clover	Vincent Lefevre	Simon Truss
Fabien Coutant	Victor Liu See-le	Hirosi Utumi
Couderc Damien	Alexey Lubimov	Jan Wagemakers
Andreas Dehmel	Krzysztof Luks	Keith Warno
Micah Dowty	Marcus Lundblad	GÃÂ¶tz Waschk
Dmitry Elfimov	Anders Lundmark	Stephen Watson
Mattias Engdegard	Jose Romildo Malaquias	Andre Wyrwa
Andrew Flegg	Denis Manente	Geoff Youngs
Olivier Fourdan	Brendan McCarthy	Diego Zamboni
Eric Gillespie	Andras Mohari

Arox User Manual

Chapter 1. Introduction

Features

Chapter 2. The menus

The display menu

Permissions

The file menu

The select menu

The new menu

The window menu

The help menu

The send to menu

Showing different applications for different types

The bookmarks menu

Chapter 3. Mouse button and key bindings

Chapter 4. Options

Chapter 5. Filetypes

The Set Run Action box

Setting the run action by drag-and-drop

Setting the run action by entering a shell command

Setting the default media-type handlers

The Set Icon box

How filetypes are stored

How the filer determines a file's type

Chapter 6. Renaming files in bulk

Chapter 7. Removable devices

Appendix A. Manual page

USAGE

DESCRIPTION

COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS

LICENSE (arox)

AUTHORS

LICENSE (ROX-filer)

AUTHORS

References