LXDE Blog

Finally, Directory Tree is Back!

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Directory tree demo

The directory tree is not yet added to PCManFM itself. This screenshot is the demo program included in libfm. A very primitive directory tree is finished. Later I’ll add this to PCManFM.

Many people are curious about this feature since it used to be available in old PCManFM 0.5 series, but why it’s not implemented in the new series?

  1. We want a better one which supports asynchronous I/O and does not block the UI.
  2. It supports gio. So later we may add remote filesystem supports to it.
  3. It might run faster than the old one
  4. The source code is cleaner and more well-structured
  5. The “<Empty>” items look weird and less elegant, but detecting whether a folder contains sub folders and keeping all the nodes updated in real time requires much more resources since you have monitor all of them one by one. On Linux it’s not an issue since inotify supports monioring of tons of files. On other POSIX systems, this can potentially use up all file descriptors available to a process. So, finally I do it like this way.

Please, stay tuned. I’ll put this in PCManFM soon.

PCMan

6 responses to “Finally, Directory Tree is Back!”

  1. I’ve never used that feature, but maybe I’ll start use it.

  2. I miss it. Good to know it is coming back. Thanks

    By the way, I also use Elementary icon theme. What gtk theme is that on the screenshot?

  3. How about porting this to gtk3 (which is supposed to be faster and now present in major distros which use gnome3)?