LXDE Blog

Recent PCManFM/libfm updates

During this weekend, much has been changed in libfm.
Many small bugs are fixed, and some missing features are implemented.
Please test it.

Current libfm-demo in git

Get the latest source code from git repo.
git clone git://pcmanfm.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/pcmanfm/libfm

Recent Changes:

  • Remote folders get updated when files in them get changed in libfm.
  • Trash can icon in side pane is changed to ‘user-trash-full’ when the trash can contains files.
  • Icons are reloaded when GTK+ icon theme get changed.
  • Fix many bugs and memory leaks
  • Can create new folders and blank files in current folder.
  • Can manage bookmark items in side pane with drag and drop.
  • Libfm became a real installable library and the header files go to /usr/include/fm. Now libfm can be used by other programmers.
  • Auto-completion for path entry becomes more visually-appealing
  • See git logs for more details

Besides, since most planned features/APIs of the libfm was finished, the developement of new pcmanfm is now started and will later be available on git, too.

The performance of libfm was quite acceptable on moderate machine, but will be worse then the original pcmanfm on older machines. However, I haven’t done much optimization yet. So there is still space for further speed optimization.

If you have gvfs installed, libfm can utilize it and can access remote file systems. In addition, trash can support is available.
Cheers!

PCMan

3 responses to “Recent PCManFM/libfm updates”

  1. I’m curious, what do you use for mounting media such as USB sticks? Do you have your own mounter that uses devicekit-disks directly, or do you rely on gvfs which in turn uses gnome-disk-utility for mounting? g-d-u brings in gnome stuff, which I’d like to avoid.

  2. So! Lets start.
    1. Date of compiling: 24.12.09
    2. System: Koala (Ubuntu 9.10, XFCE DE)
    3. Source code from svn on sourceforge.net

    1. Download & Compile – there wasn’t any big errors
    2.Run: nothing, in console: error while loading shared libraries: libfm.so.0 and libfm-gtk.so.0
    Solved by coping these files from /usr/local/lib to /usr/lib Any ideas how to avoid this in the future?

    About program:
    1. Dialog ‘preferences’ don’t work
    2. Clicking on ‘Applications’ – crash or deep hang
    3.Didn’t see tabs and will I not see them anymore?
    4. Viewing order, style and other preferences don’t save after closing libfm-demo,
    5. Operations to mount-unmount USB flash drive (FAT32) – crashed very often. To unmount – ask root pass.
    6. All system path like ‘trash:///’, ‘computer:///’, ‘applications:///’ and others don’t save in history, so I can’t back to them by (Alt-Left or Right) or clicking ‘Back-Next’
    7. Very uncomfortable that there is no ‘filesystem’ link to ‘/’
    8. Windows network (‘smb://’) didn’t see any computers. smbnetfs is installed and manually mounted – works fine.

    So It’s for a while.
    Thank u for working at this FM