1gentoo(1x) gentoo(1x)
2
6 gentoo - A highly configurable file manager for X
7
9 gentoo [--version] [--locale-info] [--root-ok] [--no-rc] [--no-gtkrc]
10 [--no-dir-history] [--left=path] [--right=path] [--run=ARG]
11
13 gentoo is a file manager for Linux and compatible systems. It allows
14 you to interactively navigate your file system using the mouse, and
15 also to perform various fairly standard operations (such as copy, move,
16 rename, ...) on the files and directories contained therein.
17 gentoo always shows you the contents of two directories at once. Each
19 of these is displayed in its own scrollable list, called a pane. At any
20 time, exactly one pane is the current pane, and has a highlighted bar
21 running across its top region. The current pane acts as the source for
22 all file operations, while the other pane is the destination. You can
23 select rows in panes using selection methods of varying complexity
24 (from simply clicking a row, to selecting rows by name using a regular
25 expression). Once you have a selection, you can click a button to per‐
26 form some command on the selected files.
27 All file operations performed by gentoo are implemented natively. When
29 you use gentoo to copy a file, for example, gentoo does not simply exe‐
30 cute the system's cp(1L) command. Rather, gentoo contains its own code
31 for opening source and destination files, and then reading and writing
32 the right amount of data between them. This way of doing things makes
33 gentoo independent of the availability of shell commands to do things.
34 gentoo incorporates a fairly powerful, object-oriented file typing and
36 styling system. It can use a variety of ways to determine the type of
37 the files it is displaying. Each type is then linked to something
38 called a style, which controls how rows of that type are rendered in
39 panes. You can use this system to control icons, colors, and various
40 operations on the rows. For example, it is easy to make gentoo display
41 all PNG images in red, and to invoke The GIMP(1) on them when double-
42 clicked.
43 A design goal with gentoo has been to provide full GUI configurability,
45 removing the need to edit a configuration file by hand and restart the
46 program to see the changes, as is otherwise common in many programs for
47 Un*x. As a result of this, gentoo features a Configuration dialog win‐
48 dow where you can configure most aspects of its operation directly,
49 using the mouse and standard GUI widgets.
50 gentoo borrows its basic look'n'feel from the classic Amiga file man‐
52 ager Directory OPUS, but is not a "clone" of any kind.
53
55 gentoo is not primarily driven by command line arguments, but the fol‐
56 lowing are available:
57 --version
59 Causes gentoo to print its version number (a string of the form
60 MAJOR.MINOR.MICRO, like 0.20.7) to the standard output, and then
61 exit successfully. Numbers having an odd MINOR component indi‐
62 cate development versions of the program. So far, all versions
63 of gentoo have been classified as being development versions.
64 --locale-info
66 Makes gentoo print a couple of localization settings, and then
67 exit. This is mostly useful during development and debugging,
68 and not of a lot of interest when just using the application.
69 --root-ok
71 Makes gentoo accept being run by the root user. Normally, this
72 is not allowed since it is considered a big threat to system
73 security. Note that gentoo has the ability to execute user-
74 defined strings using the execvp(3) function. This is generally
75 considered harmful. However, if you really want to run gentoo
76 while logged on as root, supplying this option allows you to. It
77 is not recommended, though.
78 --no-rc
80 Starts up gentoo without loading any configuration file. This
81 makes it run using the built-in defaults, which are very Spartan
82 indeed. Seldom comfortable, but occasionally handy when trying
83 to determine if a problem is with the configuration or with the
84 core code.
85 --no-gtkrc
87 Avoids loading the GTK+ RC file, thus disabling any widget cus‐
88 tomizations, and forces all widgets to use the default GTK+
89 look.
90 --no-dir-history
92 Avoids loading the file that holds the history, i.e. which
93 directories have been previously visited by the two panes. Very
94 rarely needed, included mostly for completeness' sake.
95 --left, --right (or -1, -2)
97 Sets the initial path for the left and right pane, respectively.
98 If present, the path specified with one of these options over‐
99 rides any other path for the pane in question. See below (Ini‐
100 tial Directory Paths) for details.
101 --run ARG (or -rARG)
103 Runs ARG, a gentoo command. Commands specified this way are exe‐
104 cuted before gentoo accepts any user input through the graphical
105 interface, but after the configuration file has been read in.
106 You can use it many times in order to make gentoo run a whole
107 series of commands. Remember that gentoo's command names are
108 case-sensitive, and that built-in commands (like "About") always
109 begin with a capital letter.
110 Any non-option command arguments will be silently ignored. If an argu‐
113 ment "-h" or "--help" is given, gentoo will give a summary of its sup‐
114 ported command line options and exit successfully. If an unknown option
115 is given, or a option is missing a required argument, gentoo will whine
116 and exit with a failure.
117
119 When gentoo starts up, it will open up its single main window, which is
120 split vertically (or horizontally; it's configurable) down the middle,
121 forming the two panes mentioned above. It also contains a bank of but‐
122 tons along the bottom.
123 Initial Directory Paths
125 The actual paths shown in the two panes upon start-up can be controlled
126 in various ways. There are four ways of getting a path to show up in
127 pane. In order of decreasing priority, they are:
128 1. Command-line Argument
130 Using the --left and --right (or their short forms, -1 and -2)
131 command-line arguments overrides any other setting.
132 2. Configured Default Directory
134 If no command-line argument is present, and the "Default Direc‐
135 tory" configuration option is set, that directory is used.
136 3. Most Recently Visited Directory
138 If no default directory exists, the most recently visited direc‐
139 tory is taken from the directory history for each pane. This
140 only works if a directory history file has been found and
141 loaded.
142 4. Current Directory
144 If all else fails, gentoo uses the current directory (".").
145 Navigating
147 Navigating around the file system using gentoo is very simple. The two
148 panes act as independent views of the file system, and both are navi‐
149 gated in exactly the same way.
150 You can always see which directory a pane is showing by reading its
152 path, shown in the entry box below (by default--you can change the
153 position to above) the pane.
154 To enter a directory, locate it in the pane and double click it with
156 the left mouse button. gentoo will read the directory's contents, and
157 update the display accordingly.
158 There are several ways of going up in the directory structure. To enter
160 the directory containing the one currently shown (the current dir's
161 parent), you can: click the parent button (to the left of the path
162 entry box); hit Backspace on your keyboard; click the middle mouse but‐
163 ton; select "Parent" from the pop-up menu on the right mouse button, or
164 click the downward arrow to the right of the path box (this pops up the
165 directory history menu), then select the second row from the top.
166 Selecting Files
168 Before you can do anything to a file, you need to select it. All file-
169 management commands in gentoo act upon the current selection (in the
170 current pane). There are several ways of selecting files, but the most
171 frequently used are mouse-based. Note that the word "file" used below
172 really should be taken to mean "file or directory", since selection
173 doesn't distinguish between the two.
174 To select a file (or directory), just point the mouse at the name (any‐
176 where in the row is fine), and click the left mouse button. The colors
177 of the clicked row will change, indicating that it is currently
178 selected. To select more rows, keep the mouse button down, and drag the
179 mouse vertically. gentoo extends the selection, including all rows
180 touched. If you drag across the top or bottom border, the pane will
181 scroll, trying to keep up. This is a very quick and convenient way of
182 selecting multiple files, as long as they are listed in succession.
183 If you click again on an already selected file, you will unselect it.
185 You can drag to unselect several files, just as when selecting.
186 To select a sequence of files without dragging, first click normally on
188 the first file that you wish to select. Then release the mouse button,
189 locate the last file in the sequence (it can be either above or below
190 the first one), hold down shift on your keyboard, and click the wanted
191 file. gentoo now adds all files between the first and the last to the
192 current selection.
193 If you follow the instructions given above to select a sequence, but
195 press control rather than shift before clicking the second time, gentoo
196 will unselect the range of files indicated.
197 If you click on a file with the meta key held down (that's actually a
199 key labeled Alt, located to the immediate left of the space bar, on my
200 PC keyboard), gentoo will do something cool: it will select (or unse‐
201 lect, it's a toggle just like ordinary selection) all files, including
202 the clicked one, that have the same type as the one you clicked. This
203 can be used to select for example all PNG image files in a directory
204 even if you can only see one. Occasionally very useful.
205 If you click on a file with both the shift and control keys held down,
207 gentoo will toggle the selected state of all files having the same file
208 name extension as the one you clicked. This can sometimes be useful to
209 select files that you don't have a proper type defined for, as long as
210 those files do share an extension, that is.
211 Changing Sort Order
213 The files and directories listed in each of gentoo's two panes are
214 always sorted on some column: typically file name. You can chose to
215 sort on some other field by clicking the appropriate column title once.
216 If you click on the field that is already current, the sorting will be
217 reversed (i.e., for names it will be Z-A rather than A-Z).
218 If your display includes icons, try sorting on that column: gentoo will
220 then order each row according to its File Style, grouping the rows
221 based on their parent styles, all the way up to the root of the Style
222 tree. This means that, for example, JPEG and PNG pictures (both having
223 an immediate parent style of Image) will be shown together, and before
224 all Text files (HTML, man pages and so on). It's quite cool, really. :)
225 Executing Commands
227 Commands are used to make gentoo do stuff. The typical command operates
228 upon the set of selected files in the current pane, so it's usually a
229 good idea to first select some files. See the previous subsection for
230 details on how to select files. Once you have a bunch of files
231 selected, you need to tell gentoo which command to execute. There are
232 several ways of doing this.
233 Most basic file operations (e.g. copy, move, rename, and so on) are
235 found on the (cleverly labeled) buttons along the bottom of gentoo's
236 main window. To copy a file, just select it, then click the button
237 labeled "Copy". It's really that simple. Most of these built-in (or
238 native) commands automatically operate recursively on directories, so
239 you could copy (or move) a whole directory of files by just selecting
240 it and then clicking "Copy".
241 If you can't see a button that does what you want to do, there's a
243 chance that the command exists, but isn't bound. Click the right mouse
244 button in a pane, this opens up the "pane pop-up menu". Select the
245 "Run..." item. This opens up a dialog window showing all available com‐
246 mands. Select a command, and click "OK" to execute it.
247
249 gentoo is a pretty complicated program; it has a rather large amount of
250 configuration data that it needs in order to be really useful. For
251 example, my current personal configuration file contains well over a
252 thousand different configuration values.
253 To store this hefty amount of configuration data, gentoo uses a heavily
255 structured configuration file. In fact, the file is (or at least it
256 should be) legal XML!
257 When new features are added to gentoo, they will typically require some
259 form of configuration data. This data is then simply added somewhere in
260 the existing configuration file structure. Effort is made to assign
261 reasonable built-in default values for all such new features, so older
262 configuration files (that don't contain the values required by the new
263 features) should still work. The first time you hit "Save" in the con‐
264 figuration window after changing your version of gentoo, your personal
265 configuration file will be updated to match the version of gentoo.
266 Describing how to go about configuring gentoo is too big a topic for a
268 manual page to cover. I'll just say that the command to open up the
269 configuration window is called "Configure". It is by default available
270 on a button (typically the top-right one), in the pane pop-up menu, and
271 also by pressing the C key on your keyboard.
272
274 ~/.config/gentoo/gentoorc
275 A user's personal configuration file. When gentoo starts up, it
276 will try to load this file. If the file isn't found, the old
277 name ~/.gentoorc is tested, and if that also fails a site-wide
278 configuration (see below) will be tried instead.
279 /usr/local/etc/gentoorc
281 This is the site-wide configuration file. If a user doesn't have
282 a configuration in his/her home directory, gentoo loads this
283 file instead. The actual location of this file is slightly sys‐
284 tem-dependent, the above is the default. As an end user, you
285 typically won't need to access this file manually.
286 ~/.config/gentoo/dirhistory
288 This file contains lists of the most recently visited directo‐
289 ries, for both panes. These are the lists that appear in the
290 drop-down menu when the arrow next to the path entry box is
291 clicked. Can be disabled in the Dir Pane configuration.
292 ~/.config/gentoo/gtkrc
294 This file allows you to control the look of the widgets used by
295 gentoo, through the GTK+ style system. You can change the actual
296 path in gentoo's Configuration window, the above is the typical
297 default for a modern Linux-based system. If a file named gtkrc
298 is not found in the configured path, the names gentoogtkrc and
299 .gentoogtkrc (note the period), in that order, are also tested.
300 /etc/passwd, /etc/group
302 These two files normally hold the system's password and group
303 information. These are (probably) the ones gentoo uses to map
304 user IDs to login names, to do tilde-expansion (mapping of user
305 name to directory path), and to map group IDs to group names.
306 That is probably, because gentoo doesn't actually refer to these
307 files by name. Instead, it uses the (BSD-style) API function
308 calls getpwent(3) and getgrent(3) to access this information.
309 /etc/fstab, /proc/mounts, (or /etc/mtab)
311 These files contain data on available and mounted file systems.
312 They are read by gentoo's auto-mounting code. You can configure
313 the exact file names used, on the "Mounting" tab in the main
314 configuration window. Note that using /proc/mounts rather than
315 /etc/mtab is recommended on Linux systems; they contain roughly
316 the same data, but the one in /proc is always up to date, and
317 faster to read!
318
321 All releases of gentoo numbered 0.x.y, where x (the so called minor
322 version number) is odd, are to be considered development releases, as
323 opposed to stable ones. This means that the software will probably suf‐
324 fer from bugs. If you find something that you suspect is indeed a bug,
325 please don't hesitate to contact the author! For details on how to do
326 this, see below.
327 If you're concerned about using potentially buggy and completely unwar‐
329 ranted software to manage your precious files, please feel free not to
330 use gentoo. The world is full of alternatives.
331 The chances that a bug gets fixed increase greatly if you report it.
333 When reporting a bug, you must describe how to reproduce it, and also
334 try to be as detailed and precise as possible in your description of
335 the actual bug. If possible, perhaps you should include the output of
336 gdb(1) (or whatever your system's debugger is called). In some cases it
337 might be helpful if you include the configuration file you were using
338 when the problem occurred. Before reporting a bug, please make sure
339 that you are running a reasonably recent version of the software, since
340 otherwise "your" bug might already been fixed. See below for how to
341 obtain new releases.
342 Also, you should locate and read through the BUGS file distributed with
344 gentoo, so you don't go through all this hassle just to report an
345 already known bug, thereby wasting everybody's time...
346
348 gentoo was written, from scratch, by Emil Brink. The first line of code
349 was written on May 15th, 1998. It is my first program to use the GTK+
350 GUI toolkit, my first program to be released under the GPL, and also my
351 first really major Linux application.
352 The only efficient way to contact me (to report bugs, give praise, sug‐
354 gest features/fixes/extensions/whatever) is by Internet e-mail. My
355 address is <emil@obsession.se>. Please try and include the word "gen‐
356 too" in the Subject part of your e-mail, to help me organize my inbox.
357 Thanks. If you're really not in the mood for the direct feel of e-
358 mail, the second best choice for reporting bugs and making suggestions
359 is the use the web-based bug tracker at <https://sourceforge.net/p/gen‐
360 too/bugs/>. Thanks for contributing.
361
363 The author wishes to thank the following people for their various con‐
364 tributions to gentoo:
365 Johan Hanson (<johan@tiq.com>)
367 Johan is the man behind all icon graphics in gentoo, and also
368 the author of the custom widgets used in it. He also comes up
369 with plenty of ideas for new features and changes to old ones,
370 some of which are even implemented. Johan has stuff at
371 <http://www.bahnhof.se/~misagon/>.
372 Jonas Minnberg (<sasq@nightmode.org>)
374 Jonas did intensive testing of early versions of gentoo, and
375 eventually persuaded me into releasing it (back around version
376 0.9.7 or so).
377 Ulf Petterson (<ulf@obsession.se>)
379 Ulf drew the main gentoo logo (the one shown in the About win‐
380 dow), and also designed the main HTML documentation's layout.
381 Josip Rodin (<jrodin@jagor.srce.hr>)
383 Maintainer of the gentoo package for Debian Linux, and also a
384 source of suggestions for improvements, as well as a relay for
385 bug reports from Debian Linux users.
386 Ryan Weaver (<ryanw@infohwy.com>)
388 Maintainer of the gentoo packages for Red Hat Linux, and proba‐
389 bly one of the fastest package creators out there. :)
390 Oliver Braun, Jim Geovedi and Pehr Johansson
392 Maintainers of gentoo ports to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD,
393 respectively.
394 Thanks also to all people who have mailed me about gentoo, providing
396 bug reports, feature requests, and the occasional kind word. :^) It's
397 because of people like yourselves that we have this wonderful computer
398 platform to play with.
399
401 gentoo is released as free, open-source software, under the terms of
402 the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), version 2. This license is
403 included in the distribution under the traditional name of COPYING, and
404 I suggest that you read it if you're not familiar with it. If you can't
405 find the file, but have Internet access, you could take a look at
406 <http://www.gnu.org/>. It is important to realize that the mentioned
407 license means that there is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY for this software.
408
410 Some unfinished, outdated, but still pretty informative documentation
411 is available, in HTML format, in the docs/ subdirectory in the distri‐
412 bution archive. If you haven't installed gentoo from the original
413 .tar.gz distribution archive, you might need to either inspect the dis‐
414 tribution you did use (perhaps it came as some form of "package"), or
415 contact a system administrator.
416 The GTK+ GUI toolkit that gentoo requires is available at
418 <http://www.gtk.org/>. gentoo uses the slightly outdated stable
419 series, called 1.2.x. The latest known release in that series is GTK+
420 1.2.10. Because of severe performance problems, gentoo will probably
421 not be ported to use the current (2.0.x) series of GTK+ any time soon.
422 The latest version of gentoo is always available on the official gentoo
424 home page, at <http://www.obsession.se/gentoo/>.
425
427 regex(7), file(1), magic(5), fstab(5), strftime(3)
428 Manual page section numbers in this page refer to sections on (some?)
430 Linux systems, your mileage will most likely vary. Try the apropos(1)
431 command, it might help you out.
432Obsession Development June, 2016 gentoo(1x)