Using the New File Browser

The Main Menu

Browser Submenu Functions

Spawn: Open another file browser in the same directory.
Open Finder (Mac Only): Open a finder window in the same directory.
Open Explorer (Windows Only): Open a Windows explorer in the same directory.
Open CBrowser (eXept Only): Open a C-Browser in the same directory. This is a C-language development tool used in-house within eXept.
Add Texteditor Page: Adds another text editor tab.
Add Shell Page: Adds another shell window tab.
Add Archiver Page: Adds another archiver tab.
Add Search Page: Adds another search tab.
Exit: Closes the fileBrowser.

Directory Submenu Functions

Up: Move to the parent directory.
Back: Move backwards in the list of previously visited directories.
Forward: Move forward in the list of previously visited directories.
Home: Move to the user's home directory.
Desktop: Move to the user's desktop directory.
Current Directory: Move to the current directory. This is the directory from which ST/X was started (not required to be the ST/X installation directory).
ST/X Directory: Move to the ST/X installation directory. This is the directory in which the ST/X binary was installed.
ST/X Temporary Directory: Move to the ST/X temporary directory. This is where ST/X creates temporary files.
Make Current Directory: Make this the "current" directory. The current directory (read a Unix programmer's manual) is the folder on which relative file names (i.e. without an initial "/") are based.
Bookmarks: A submenu for quick navigation to bookmarked directories.
Visited History: A submenu for quick navigation to previously visited directories.

File Submenu Functions

Open: Open the selected file.
If the selected file is a textFile, its contents is read and shown in the contents view.
If the file contains a bitmap image, an image editor is opened.
FileIn: loads the selected file(s) into the system. The file must be either a Smalltalk source file, containing valid Smalltalk expressions in fileOut-format (chunk format), or a dll containing a compiled SmalltalkX class library.
FileIn to Namespace: loads the selected file(s) into the system but enforces classes to loaded into a given namespace to prevent overloading of existing classes. The file must be a Smalltalk source file (i.e. binary class files cannot be loaded into another namespace).
New ...: Creates a new directory, empty plain file, symbolic- or hardLink (if supported by the OperatingSystem)
Cut - Copy - Paste: allow for files to be moved/copied to other folders.
Remove: remove the currently selected file(s) and/or directory(s). A dialog will ask for confirmation.
Erase: first erase the file(s) physically, by overwriting disk blocks. Then logically remove them. This is useful for files which contain security data, such as cryptographic keys or passwords, as the original contents can usually not be recovered by "file undelete" tools. However, no absolute guaranty is given here, as the details depend on how actual hardware handles caches, ssd buffers etc.
Rename...: rename the selected file(s) or directory(s). A dialog will ask for the new name.
Move To...: move the selected file(s) to another directory. A dialog will ask for the destination.
Copy To...: copy the selected file(s) to another directory. A dialog will ask for the destination.
Properties: show file information of the selected file. This includes file type, owner, size and access rights.
Visited History: A submenu for quick navigation to previously visited files.

Edit Submenu Functions

Copy Selected Names to Clipboard: places a copy of the selected file names into the cut & paste buffer.
Useful, when editing Makefiles, and you need a list of some files in a directory.
Copy All Names to Clipboard: places a copy of the file list into the cut & paste buffer.
Useful, when editing Makefiles, and you need a list of all files in a directory.

View Submenu Functions

Detail

toggles individual columns in the file list view. By default, only the name, size and modification date is shown. It may take a longer to read directories if more columns are choosen.

Sort By...

Changes the sorting criteria of the filenames in the fileList.

Show - Hidden Files

toggles display of hidden files whose name begins with a period ".". By default, these are not shown in the list.

Show - Tool Menu etc.

toggles display of various subcomponents, such as the toolbar, the bookmarks bar, the path field and the info label at the bottom.

Update

reread the directory and update the file list.

This function is normally not needed, since the fileBrowser checks for modifications of the current directory in regular intervals, updating the list automatically every few seconds. However, a manual update may be needed in certain situations (for example, if the time/dates are out of sync between NFS hosts) or if you do not want to wait for the next automatic update.

Tools Submenu Functions

Unix Command... (DOS Command...)

allows execution of any unix command; a popup box allows input of the command. The output of the command is inserted in the contents view at the cursor position.

Shell Terminal

Open a separate shell command window (similar to "xterm" on Unix or "command.exe" on Windows).

Changes Browser

Open a changesBrowser on the selected file (which should contain Smalltalk source code)

Workspace

Open a workspace window showing on the selected file's contents.

Install as Autoloaded

Consult the selected file and install an autoloaded class stub for it. The file must contain valid Smalltalk source code in chunk format.

Install All as Autoloaded

Consult all files with an ST suffix in the selected directory and install autoloaded class stubs for them. The files must contain valid Smalltalk source code in chunk format.

Install All as Autoloaded (Recursive)

Recursively consult all files with an ST suffix in the selected directory and all of its subdirectories and install autoloaded class stubs for them. The files must contain valid Smalltalk source code in chunk format.

File Operations Menu

Contains items for less frequently used operations:

Split File: Split a file into manageable pieces (for example for transport in a USB stick, or to be sent via mail, if the mailer does not accept big files).
Merge Files: The reverse operation to the above split: concatenate multiple pieces into a single file.
Copy Currupted File To..: Reads a file and copies it to another place. However, any read errors are cought, and the file's corrupt area is skipped (written as zeros) after a number of retries have failed. This operation can be used to recover parts from unreadable disks, tapes or old floppy disk media, which happens to be unreadable as a whole, but may still contain some readable fragments.
Rot13: Show a rot13 (poor man's) text obfuscated file's contents.
Truncate: Truncate a file to a given size. Useful to cut long log files or the output of a runaway program back to size.
File difference view: Open a diff-text view.
First, a dialog is opened, asking for two filenames - these are compared and the changes are shown highligted in a two-column diff view.
Differences Between Folders: Recursively scans two folder hierarchies for differences.

File Tools Menu

Contains items for less frequently used file tools, especially viewers and editors:

Editor: Open a separate text editor window on the selected file.
HTML Reader: Open an HTML reader on the selected file.
XML Inspector: Displays XML data in a hierarchical tree fashion.
Image Editor: Open the Smalltalk/X bitmap image editor on the selected file (which should contain a bitmap image in one of the supported formats: XBM, XPM, JPEG, GIF, TIFF etc. .
Zip Tool: Open a ZIP tool on the selected file (which should contain a zip compressed archive of files).
This tool lists the zip-archives contents and allows extraction of individual files.

File Search Menu

Contains items for more exhaustive search operations:

Search...: Open a separate search window. This is the same as the embedded search page tab.
Same Contents as Selected: Search for files with the same contents as the selected one.
Duplicates: Search for all duplicate files in the shown directory.
All Duplicates (Recursive): Search for all duplicate files in the shown directory and all of its sub directories.

Character Encoding (charset)
By default, the file browser assumes ISO8859-1 encoding, and tries to figure out a file's encoding (by heuristic rules), when a file's contents is read (eg. by double clicking). Usually, UTF-8 encoded files are detected, and the charset-encoding changed as appropriate.
This autoselect may fail sometimes, and a specific encoding can be enforced via this menu, by first choosing an encoding and setting the "Lock" check toggle, to prevent further attempts in autoselecting.
Line End Convention
Different operating systems traditionally used different line-end encodings. By default, ST/X uses the Unix convention, where end-of-line is marked by a NL (Newline, ascii 10) character. If you edit a file with a different line end convention, change to CR-NL (for MSDOS family of operating systems), CR (for VMS and older Macintosh operating systems), or one of th special conventions, which are only useful to write files for mainframes or some more exotic modem protocols.
Tab Stops
ST/X assumes that tabs in a file are conforming to the historic standard of forwarding to the next multiple of 8 spaces. When reading a file, tabs are always converted to an appropriate number of spaces, and treated as such in the editor. I.e. the text editor does not show or handle tabs at all. When writing a file, leading sequences of spaces (but only those) are converted to a number of tab characters.

Next: Directory Tree View

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Doc $Revision: 1.7 $ $Date: 2016/09/14 09:41:13 $