baubadil / elisso

Another file manager for GTK+ 3.x. Written with gtkmm, an exercise in threading and concurrency with C++11.

Elisso

Yet another file manager for Gtk+ 3 (Linux). This imitates the look for Nemo (or pre-fork Nautilus for that matter), and should eventually have all the functionality of it. The reason for the rewrite is:

1. It should have proper multithreading and be as fast as possible, especially with folders with lots of items and symlinks, including thumbnails.

2. It should display a directory tree on the left, and do it correctly (that is, only display an expander if there is at least one subfolder). That should still be fast. No file manager since the OS/2 Workplace Shell has been able to do that.

3. It should not crash.

It also serves as an exercise and testcase how to write a pretty application in modern C++11 using gtkmm 3, particularly the threading and concurrency with gtkmm and std::mutex and std::condition_variable.

Biggies that are still missing:

1. File operations. Only trashing and renaming files is implemented so far, copy/move is missing.

2. Drag and drop doesn't work either.

3. National language support. Strings are not yet marked for gettext.

4. The whole GNOME virtual file system thing. Internally Gio::File is used so that could be implemented.

Building

Development happens on 64-bit Gentoo Linux, but other Linuxes should work. Other operating systems have not been tested, but patches are welcome.

To build, run ./configure and then kmk. "kmk" is the make utility of kBuild. kmk BUILD_TYPE=debug will create a debug build instead of a release build.

There is no "kmk install" yet; after building, you will find the executable under out/linux.amd64/{release|debug}/stage/bin/elisso.

Requirements (the configure script checks for these):

1. Elisso uses kBuild (the VirtualBox build system; http://trac.netlabs.org/kbuild). It's the best build system in the world, is based on GNU make and traditional makefiles, can handle anything and runs on many platforms. On Gentoo, it's dev-util/kbuild and should be installed already if you have VirtualBox installed as it's required for building it. On Debian it's "kbuild".

2. Elisso requires libpcre for fast regular expressions. pcre.h must be in INCLUDE somewhere and libpcre must be somewhere where the linker can find it. On Gentoo it seems to be installed pretty much by default, on Debian you need "libpcre3-dev".

3. Elisso uses gtkmm for C++ GTK development. It seems to need the current stable version 3.22, so that's what the configure script tests for. Stock Debian jesse ships with 3.14, and compile fails with that.

Hacking the GtkIconView

Note that currently {include|src}/x-gtk contain a heavily edited copy of the GtkIconView control from GTK+ 3.22 (and gtkmm bindings as well). The code is functionally identical to the GTK IconView control but with edits to try and fix the performance bottlenecks therein with folders that have more than a few hundred files. The replacement control has the same API but is called XGtkIconView to avoid conflicts.

If you run ./configure --enable-xiconview, Elisso will build and use the replacement IconView, which is both faster and buggier. Otherwise the stock GTK icon view is used.

Eventually I will port the changes that actually made a speed difference back to GTK+ 3.22 and supply a patch.

Enjoy!