Using the New File Browser

Contents View

The contents view shows a sub-page depending on the file's contents and the kind of information that is to be displayed. The contents is set from a selected file either via the "Open File" menu-function, or simply by double-clicking on a file in the fileList. The contents-view can be one of the following:

Text

The text contents view provides all editing and menu functions as known from other textViews.

The popup menu's 'Accept' function saves your changed text back into the file. Usually, there is a keyboard shortcut (such as "CTRL-s" or "CMD-a") available for the accept function.
(Try the right-button popup menu to see the key assignments.)

Unless accepted, changes made to the text do not affect the underlying file.

If you change your mind, and want your editing be undone, simple select the file again (double-click) or press the "Reload" button. This will bring the original or last accepted contents of the file back into the contents view.

In case you have unsaved modifications in the contents view, you will get a warning (and a chance to change your mind) when you try to change directories, get another files contents or close the fileBrowser window.

Terminal

The terminal page allows for operating-system commands to be entered, executed, and the text-output of commands to be seen.
It behaves similar to a command- or xterm window (actually, it emulates a VT100 terminal). (the terminal emulation is not 100% bug-free; there are some situations related to wrapping behavior at the line and screen end, which may lead to incorrect display.

Notice that the current Windows-version (NT, XP and Vista) still has a bug in that the command is not echoed while being typed - instead, it is shown when the Return-key is hit. The terminal emulator contains workaround code, which echoes entered keystrokes immediately and suppresses the echo from the Windows console. However, immediate key functions (such as command and filename completion) do not work correctly.

Do not report this as a bug, as it is a known bug, for which we still have no solution yet - please send us info in how to solve it, instead.
(Strange enough: this used to work under Win95, but does no longer in NT, XP etc. Noone was able to tell us how this is done in those newer systems.)

File Search

The search page is one of the most powerful and most often used features of the FileBrowser; it allows for files to be searched by file contents, name or size.

You can search files which contain or do not contain a particular string; with an option to ignore case differences.

You can search files whose name matches a particular pattern (regex); with or without case sensitivity.

You can search files which have a bigger (>), smaller (<), same (=), different (!=) and roughly-same (~) size than a given number.

You can also quickly search for files with the same contents as another file (sometimes, this is very useful to find a duplicate).

All matching files are incrementally shown in a list. A double click onto an entry adds another tab for editing.
Notice also, that the match-list provides its own set of useful popup-menu functions.

Bitmap Image

A simple bitmap viewer is shown when a bitmap-image-file is double-clicked on; it can display JPG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, GIF and a number of other file formats. An edit button alows for the ImageEditor to be opened on the file.

Encoding Field

The encoding field shown in the lower information area displays the browser's encoding, which is used when reading/writing files. When reading a file, the browser tries to find the file's encoding by searching for a character sequence like encoding: nameOfEncoding near the beginning of the file's contents, where nameOfEncoding is something like "utf-8", "iso8859-2", "jis" etc. (for a full list of supported encodings, take a look at the "CharacterEncoder » initialize" method).

The encoding can also be set explicitely, via the encoding-fields popup menu, which lists the most common encodings.
It is also possible to lock the encoding, so that the automatic mechanism above is disabled. This is useful to prevent a wrong encoding guess to be taken from a file.

Edit Mode Field

The edit mode field (which is also shown in the lower information area) displays the text-editors text-replacement mode. This can be one of "Insert", "Overwrite" or "Insert & Select".
The "overwrite" mode is especially useful when editing tabular data.

Cursor Position Fields

These two fields are found at the lower right and display the text-cursors line and column number. The cursor-line-field also provides a (right-click) dialog for cursor positioning.

Next: How to Perform Common Tasks

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