OpenGEU and EFM status + new shelves code

2009-07-04 20:32:02 by thedarkmaster

Hallo everyone, so, this post is about Enlightenment, OpenGEU and the Enlightenment File Manager (EFM). Very long news, so be prepared :)

Some moths ago, I told you Sergey Semernin was working hardly on EFM as a paid developer for OpenGEU, thanks to your donations.

I’m now proud to tell you all that all tasks reguarding EFM contained in this release schedule are now completed thanks to Sergey, that is, thanks to your donations and to our own funds. Not just that! Sergey is now deeply into the E project and has SVN direct access, so, he will keep working on a better E17 for free, as a normal opensource developer! So, thanks to our coding action, the Enlightenment project now has another skilled developer on its Team! Sergey, of course, is still considered as an OpenGEU team member. That means, we are getting always more inside Enlightenment and are always more useful for the project :)

That’s a big goal reached for us. E17 is getting always better also thanks to the hard work of our team members who are also E members (Like Dave, Quaker, Sergey and Hannes J.)!

Now, for another new adventure. EFM is way more usable now that all of the features in the release schedule are accomplished, but it still isn’t usable for the end user in our opinion. So, we’re keeping on geting it better. Our plans for EFM are as follows:

• desktop icons in grid but movable
• ability to add several toolbars
• ability to put toolbar on the left or on the right
• ability to change toolbar's size
• sidebar gadget -> directory tree and a list of harddisks, removable devices, bookmarks and places like network and trash - switchable between tree and a list
• list view needs more information
• sorting by name, size, type and date - ascending and descending, and manual sort
• ability to execute files
• ability to set executable permissions
• ability to set owner and group to a file
• ability to recursively set permissions on directories
• support for custom actions(in a submenu maybe.. ) - propably with .desktop files?
• support for basic scripting in custom actions(variables representing selected dir, current dir etc)
• support for showing action only on some file types -> minor i think
• ability to select all files and dirs in dir
• ability to select several files according to regular expression or some basic characters like *,. etc you enter -> minor i think
• ability to create an empty file
• support for plugins(like samba shares plugin, archiver plugin..)
• support for "send to" submenu
• internal support for trash - done with efreet_trash - enter trash from efm + basic things like moving things to trash, emptying trash.. etc
• internal support for paths like smb:// and trash:// - done with efm_path propably..
• statusbar support
• FTP support
• bookmarks support in fileman menu
• ability to create new bookmark easily from filemanager
• BUGFIX -> when one click file open is disabled, don't enter dirs with one click
• support for creating symbolic links more easily(you click on "Create symlink" it will show a window and you will write where it should point)
• delete key should move to trash and shift+delete should delete directly
• MINOR -> video thumbnails and sound thumbnails
• "close all EFM windows" support
• support for duplicating files
• support for global system clipboard - when i copy something in efm, it is pasteable in nautilus for example, and when something like clipboard daemon is running, keep the copied thing in clipboard also when efm is closed
• support for when you right-click on desktop on place where is no icon, it will show fileman menu with basic things like create new directory/empty file, change wallpaper, create launcher and change screen resolution/refresh rate - optional for user - he will be able to keep the old way

Note that we don’t have a timeline for these features to be released but we’ll do our best to accomplish as soon as possible all tasks, as we did for those contained in the release schedule :)

As for the rest of E, we are now focusing mainly on shelves. They have some problems right now, related to positioning of modules. Currently, it is handled badly, with absolute positions in pixels, while positioning should be relative to the screen resolution. This means that when resizing your screen, the position of modules on a shelf is messed up if the shelf is wide as the screen. Of course, this is not acceptable, so we just opened a RentACoder auction here! If you are interested on more details on what we are going to implement as new features and fixes in shelves, please visit that link and read more! If you can help, of course, please do :)

Many new features are also being added on the shelves and desktop gadgets system (gadman), like a full integration between shelves and desktop modules positioning. We are trying to make it as good as possible :)

Know that really cool and important new software by our team is on the way too. We’ll have some cool fireworks soon enough for you to joy with! just wait and see. You can follow our development on a testing machine with our alpha repos!