Another week, another snapshot. I’ve fixed few bugs and added few items in Edit and View menu. Also I changed the tab behavior so that when you close last tab, CE will open the "home" folder. Also when drive or media (CD etc.) is removed, all tabs that were browsing those locations are now closed automatically. I didn’t have time to do much testing with that feature so please let me know how it works.
On other notes, I switched to Ubuntu in my laptop. I did do a dual boot install but haven’t used Windows at all after the switch. Or well, I have used it but it’s been inside Ubuntu with VirtualBox. All in all, I’ve enjoyed every minute of using Ubuntu instead of Windows. Only issue I noticed was the fact that the file manager isn’t very good. However I have a plan to fix that. The plan is called CubicExplorer Lite. It will be a simple cross-platform file manager. Nothing special, just tabs and bookmarks. The plan is that CubicExplorer 2.0 will be cross-platform app, and as it looks like I need to switch to another programming language to make that happen, CubicExplorer Lite will be a perfect learning project.
Anyway, CE Lite is not top priority project at the moment so can’t say when there’s going to be something to show. I’m still choosing the programming language (suggestions are welcome) so it might take a while.
Change Log
- Added #204, Auto select first item.
- Added "New" and "New Folder" items in Edit menu.
- Added "Arrange By" and "Group By" items in View menu.
- Updated Chinese Simplified translation.
- Changed #211, Now closes unavailable tabs when drive/media is removed.
- Changed #212, Now opens "Home" folder when last tab is closed.
- Fixed #198, FolderTree shouldn’t show "Network Connections" items.
- Fixed #199, EAccessViolation
- Fixed #200, EAssertionFailed
- Fixed #207, Drive bar doesn’t respect the "Open in new tab by default" option.
CubicExplorer 0.90.0.1081 (SVN Snapshot)
Installer (2.1MB)
Zip (2.0MB)
Personally I think the Gnome file manager, Nautilus (I assume that’s the one you’re talking about) is pretty good, better than Windows Explorer at least. Same with KDE’s file manager. They have some features they blew me away (thanks to a flexible backend provided by Linux).
For example, you can browse FTP and SSH and SFTP just like any other filesystem by using them as protocols: ssh://username@hostname/ etc.
Windows Explorer can only do FTP, and it isn’t as integrated (IIRC you can’t do everything on FTP that you can on a normal filesystem that you really should be able to do) as Nautilus is.
KDE’s file manager also has three options for viewing inline PDFs in the window (a bit overkill, but once you pick one it’s nice). I haven’t tried to see if Nautilus has anything like that.
And I love the combination TreeView/ListView browsing method. FYI as a side note that would be nice to see in a certain Windows file manager…
It would require a custom control though which may make it a pain to code. 
Yeah, the backend is really cool. I love the fact that FTP and SSH work out of the box. I’m using WebDrive with CE in windows. I also like the tree implementation in file view. I’ve been thinking about adding something similar to CE. I can use the folder tree component to do that so it’s not that big job necessarily
.
The things I’m missing are tabs and bookmark tree. Having used CE for years, it’s really awkward and slow to do things without them.
Awesome news! I use Ubuntu as my main OS and can’t wait to see what you can do for an improved file manager.
I recommend using Ultimate++ (C++ cross-platform library). It has great Gui system. great library of utilities, a very active community, and a killer IDE. I write all my cross-platform software with it (and python).
http://www.ultimatepp.org
Updated to this release and everything ran well till I started using a couple of USB drives. Now when I open a session of CE, I get a blank window for about 20 seconds. If I click the window, the title changes to “Not Responding”. It responds a few seconds later and CE appears to be OK, but it still takes 5 or10 seconds for it to respond to mouse clicks.
Running Win XP Pro SP3
Thanks!
I now think the delay (in my last post) was caused by a bookmarked network share, which happens to be on an Hamachi VPN.
Sorry about that.
@Chris
Thanks for the tip. I’ll look into it.
@Conure
Yeah, network bookmarks can be slow sometimes. I need to do some changes to them.
new snapshot for the weekend?
Yep, in few hours. You can see all scheduled build releases in the Calendar:
http://www.cubicreality.com/calendar/
That’s great to hear that you have plans afoot to do a cross platform version of CE. I’ve been using Ubuntu on and off for a while and have never found any file manager that comes even close to CE’s functionality. I always found Nautilus to be quite sluggish, Pcman has tabs but not a lot else from what I remember and there weren’t any others I found that had much extra to them then the standard features.
I did install CE in wine at some stage which seemed to run fine there but it would be great to have something specifically built to run on Linux too.
PCman looks pretty good. Very basic but that’s all I need at the moment. Only if it would have tree based bookmark panel.
I like Ubuntu a lot too and also noticed there is a good file manager missing. Although I have to admit that I haven’t used CE since I switched to Vista because of the multiple special folders, I’d suggest you try Java for cross platform programming. It has a great out of the box library and the whole approach is platform independent. The withdraw is you have to plan carefully first, but you wrote more than once that this is something you’re educating yourself in
Another benefit in using Java would be the possibility to integrate a database into CE (I used H2 within a Java program very successfully) where you could store more than just bookmarks and options - only an idea to think about =)
Anyway, I contine advertising CE as I still think it is hell of a program! Keep up the good work *thumbsup*