Website mockups

Henrik Andersen and Nick Schermer came up with two mockups for a Thunar website: Henrik’s mockup can be seen here, Nick’s mockup is here.

Just another screenshot

Spent the day implementing additional parts of Thunar’s core.

Spatial Thunar

I took the time and implemented parts of the core functionality for Thunar, as thunar-dev is pretty quiet when it comes to code-independent development. Below is a screenshot of the very first test application showing the some of the core classes in action - it’s really spatial and it’ll never be that spatial again. :-)

I decided to postpone my plans for a fully multi-threaded core. There’s actually a lot of stuff to take care of in order to make it both right and fast. It’s not necessary possible to completely hide the multi-threadedness within the ThunarFile and ThunarFolder classes, so people writing high level classes like ThunarListModel, ThunarTreeModel or ThunarDesktopView, would be presented with a more complex interface, which in turn can decrease the stability of the whole application.

The approach taken now is faster for loading directories and it makes things way easier to handle, but it can make the UI feel unresponsive while loading large directories or loading from slow media.

Progress again

So, I’d say the “Shame on you, Benny”-debate is over and we’re able to make progress again. Atleast, Jasper is requesting input. I’m going to prepare a small collection of diagrams with the most important stuff I’ve set up so far and that’ll be the rough direction for the next weeks. While the lower-level stuff is mostly settled (the left-over stuff is mostly implementation specific), the high-level stuff is mostly undefined. E.g. somebody would have to work out a set of preferences that should be configurable for Thunar. For techies, there’s the outstanding ThunarTrashFolder and ThunarTrashFile to define and implement (the latter is pretty simple, the most important thing here is to override the get_visible_name() method using the name set when trashing the file, but the former is really complex and care must be taken so the implementation does not result in something completly unmaintainable). There are a few more open issues (bookmarks, treepane, removable devices, …), so people that complained previously should be able to get their hands dirty really soon (but as a limitation, developing on Thunar is not firing up vi and starting to write code).

Clearance

I don’t want to stop work on Thunar - with the initial goals. I really like the idea of a simple file manager. The question is rather whether it fits with Xfce (or whether Xfce fits into the picture).