Benedikt Meurer JavaScript Engine Hacker and Programming Language Enthusiast.

KDE Viewer

Jasper: I also read that articles, and they are indeed very good. Especially the number 8 on Ben's list is really a very good idea. It'd be just great to have something like Preview for Xfce/Gnome. Maybe Evince could turn into something like this.

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File alteration monitoring

Just committed a change to get file alteration monitoring working again in Thunar. I had more or less carefully evaluated the possibilities of doing the monitoring within the Thunar process, using a combination of various backends:

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Thunar in Xfce SVN

Thunar was finally imported into the Xfce Subversion repository today, and it's in quite good shape (although we're still not in time for Xfce 4.4).

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Transfering files

One wouldn't imagine how difficult it can be to copy/move files around. You can come up with cp/mv hacks within a few minutes. But doing it right, with user interaction, trash support, percentage/EST calculation and all the good stuff (threaded of course, and esp. without risking data loss on the user's side), seems to be surprisingly difficult. I guess it's time to stand up from the computer and do something else.

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Time

It's wednesday already. Managed to finish my last math exam successfully this week and now I'm planning for my birthday party next saturday.

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Slow media

While testing some volume manager related stuff, I tried to load a large folder from a CD-ROM (the i386 folder from one of my more or less unused Windows 2000 install CDs, which contains about 4000 files) into the tree view and it took forever, even after the folder content was visible (I suspect this is GtkTreeView loading icon data for the invisible items, tho haven't checked yet). And of course, since currently everything runs in the main thread, the GUI was blocked.

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Autostart editor

Since we're now using desktop files instead of arbitrary scripts or symlinks, it is pretty easy to make the list of autostarted applications editable through a simple user interface. And so here's xfce4-autostart-editor:

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Future of xfce4-toys

I just removed xfce4-tips from the xfce4-toys package, since it's now included with xfce4-session. Now the question is: Where to move the eyes plugin to (which is the only component left in xfce4-toys)? We have basicly three options:

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New autostart mechanism in xfce4-session

I just changed xfce4-session to use the new standard autostart mechanism, based on Waldos second draft. Your old autostart items from ~/Desktop/Autostart/ will be migrated automatically on first run of the new session manager.

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Windows Explorer

Looks like Microsoft's Longhorn will include a GtkPathBar-like navigator for Windows Explorer. Else the screenshots look like a random mix of Aqua and the Windows XP UI, with no real concept. But I'm sure they'll polish the stuff prior to the final version.

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