Crazy idea: a Squeak-based file manager for Linux

Aaron J Reichow reic0024 at d.umn.edu
Mon Jan 27 18:30:17 UTC 2003


On Sat, 25 Jan 2003, Bill Schwab wrote:

> I just tried a quick experiment with Squeak 3.2, opening a FileList2 to
> full screen, and have a suggestion based on it.  In order to work as I
> envision, the file list would need to shed its Morphic system
> window/title bar (it won't need it) and would want to fill the Morphic
> desktop as the main (native) window is resized.  The result would be a
> pretty nice graphical file manager, or at least could become that with
> some work.

That is pretty easily done.  That is, getting one window to appear to be
the only window.  There are things you can do to make sure you can't move
the window, and when the window is resized, the inner-Morphic-window
reflects this. A debug menu accessible somewhere to turn this
one-world-one-window-one-filemanager doctorine off.

> I will probably end up doing this eventually, at least as far as saving
> an image and creating shortcuts to it, but there might a chance to get
> some "market share" among Linux users who would not otherwise know about
> Squeak.  Trying that would probably be best left for someone knowing a
> lot more than I do about Linux, RPM, and shrinking Squeak.

If you're a fan of the horizontally scrollable column view, ala OS X and
NeXTSTEP, you may want a widget I'm working on that provides this.  One of
the examples I'll provide when I'll release it is a very simple file
manager. I'm making it for Dynapad for the personal object database
browser, but I was planning on making a wee OS X-like file man with it as
well. I wasn't planning on releasing the widget on its own but with
Dynapad, but if you would like this in your file manager, and don't want
to recreate it, I could post it, it's 90% done.

Not sure if anyone else would dig such a thing, but I think it might be
neat to have a combination of the multi-columns view and the way the
Whisker browser manages the inner-mini-windows.

Regards,
Aaron

  Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
  "the question is no longer between violence and non-violence; It is
between non-violence and non-existence."  :: martin luther king junior



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