A File Manager for SDL?

I'd really like to stay focused on converting the flipclock and the links browser from png to ttf fonts, but sometimes the distractions just sorta pop up outta nowhere.  Way, way down on my todo list is a requirement for some sort of file manager for iz2jffs.  Now I don't need it myself because I'm old and the command line was the only game in town when I started using computers.  But I've seen plenty of folks struggling to find their way around when presented with a command prompt.  So when I stumbled on a file manager written in C and SDL on a raspberry pi forum, I figured I had to stop and take a look.   I tweaked a few lines of code to shrink up the display into something a bit more zipit sized, and ended up with this.

It still needs work to make it usable on the zipit, but it shows promise.  Plus it's only about 25k after upxing so it could easily fit on the jffs.  However, first I should decide if it makes more sense to add some basic file manager functions to gmenu2x instead.  Based on the grey function buttons in the image above, there really isn't all that much missing from the gmenu2x base code.

So I took another look at Dingux Commander which has a more polished look, shown here browsing the iz2jffs home directory in the left panel, and the mounted filesystems on the right.

But it's C++, and at 115K it's not such a great candidate to put on the jffs.  However, I thought maybe I could simply fold the code for the split panel view and the file manager functions into the gmenu2x C++ code base without increasing the bloat by all that much.  And as it turns out, folding the Dingux Commander code into gmenu2x (with minimal changes to make it build) only adds about 14K to the total after upxing.  So I guess I should probably provide an executable, and think about rolling another release of the jffs.

Here's a tar file with a new gmenu2x executable and that nice striped background image.  To keep it simple I used the ttf font and icon images from the gmenu2x default skin instead of the ones from Dingux Commander.   If you try it, you should see a shiny new File Manager icon in the applications folder, right next to the Explorer icon.

gmenu2x-cmdr.tgz

After getting the basics working I did some more work on the code to make it fit in better on the jffs.  I altered a few of the key bindings and turned on blended text for a smoother, more readable look.  You can see here its using the smoothed gmenu2x font and the icons from the default gmenu2x theme.  Looks nice.

 

 I also patched the Dingux Commander text file viewer to reuse the gmenu2x code that I created for viewing Latin15 text files.

Finally, I merged the Commander text input code with the gmenu2x input code to enable Latin 15 input via the zipit keyboard instead of the on screen keyboard for the mkdir and rename functions.  Altogether it seemed like a fairly useful addition to the jffs, so I rolled out yet another iz2jffs5 release.


And now I can get back to the ttf stuff.  I took a quick peek the plan9 links-varfont hack and it looks like 90 percent of the conversion from png font to ttf can be done by replacing 3 functions in dip.c:  g_print_text(), g_text_width(), and g_char_width() with the equivalent SDL_ttf functions.  I still need grep for "ifdef PLAN9" and evaluate the rest of the diffs for subtle issues, but it doesn't look too painful...