Episode: 233
Title: HPR0233: rox-filer
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0233/hpr0233.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 14:31:41

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Hey it's Deepi and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
Today I will be giving you a short review of Rocks Filer.
This review is a part of the Lightweight Application series I'm doing.
And Rocks Filer is a lightweight file manager for the X-Windows system on Linux.
Rocks is interesting for its lack of dependencies.
It depends only on the C libraries.
And so instead of having to install Dolphin or Conqueror for the KDE system,
instead of having to install Nautilus for the GNOME system,
you can instead if you want to have a lightweight system, use Rocks Filer,
apt-get install Rocks-Filer.
And if you ever installed, if you ever built other lightweight systems,
you can know that once you install the graphical file manager,
that it adds a certain weight, there's always huge, huge dependencies
to installing something like Nautilus or Conqueror.
And I assume I haven't used Dolphin yet, but I assume the same will apply to Dolphin,
whereas as Rocks Filer, it just kicks off and just needs the C library.
Now, the interesting thing about Rocks Filer is that where is its flexibility?
You can run Rocks Filer by kicking it off in an X-Term window,
and it'll come up as an application,
and it'll be a standard application with your maximize, close, resize ability of a regular window,
and inside that it's a graphical file manager.
And you can kick it off twice, and if you want to do drag and drop copying,
deleting any of that stuff, it's just like a regular file manager.
You would mouse over a file, do a right click, and context menus come up.
You can open things up in different ways, open as a default.
Open as a text file if you need to.
You can associate run actions, what applications you need to do certain things.
I'm going to just quickly do things.
I just want to get across the point that you have full features
without all the dependencies.
Now, when I say flexibility, again, back to flexibility of Rocks,
you can just put a command in your favorite menu system,
and kick off Rocks Filer.
I can application use it as a temporary file manager if you want.
However, you can also kick off Rocks and have Rocks take over your desktop.
And with command line switches, you can specify options for a desktop,
like whether or not to have a taskbar or not,
whether or not to have a toolbar or not.
And there are add-on packages, like you can get out a trash icon program
if you want to have the trash thing on your desktop, and you can have Rocks take over.
And when you take over your desktop, some people say, well, what about wallpaper?
Well, wallpaper setting is interesting, instead of,
my other favorite window manager, which is iStwM,
you have to go into a configuration file and specify a path and file name for your wallpaper.
With Rocks, you just have drag and drop.
Not only can it act as your desktop manager,
but since the desktop manager is activated as a command line,
with the command line argument, you can have multiple settings,
just by changing what file it saves it all to.
For instance, to kick off Rocks filer,
to take over the desktop, you use Rocks space,
pinboard, the space dash dash pinboard,
and you put equal and you name a file.
And it will save all the settings for that.
You can actually have multiple profiles operating under Rocks,
just by changing the command line.
And once you can change in the command line, you can modify your favorite menu application
by giving it many options to kick off Rocks in different ways,
whatever way you need to kick it off.
So that's one feature I really like, is that it's both
a desktop manager replacement in a way,
and I say it in a way because you probably still run a window manager.
And yet, you can also kick it off as an application.
That's very nice.
Now, if you happen to be a fan of GNOME, or KDE, or ISWM,
and you want to use Rocks also,
it also installs an HTMLized help file,
manual page, whatever you want to call it,
into user share doc, Rocks filer.
You can also get that online.
That man page will list, it's very well written,
it lists for each of the major desktop environments,
what you would do, what special custom settings work best with Rocks filer.
So if you want to take over, you can do that.
Rocks filer can be used, therefore, can work with GNOME,
it can work with ISWM, it can work with XFCE,
it can work with KDE, or it can stand alone,
or it can just be an app.
And I think that's really amazing, that it depends on how you want to use it,
determines how it will actually behave.
Now, when there's some nice features that it supports,
and the feature support is very consistent.
It's, of course, you get, you put your mouse into the window,
when you kick it off, it's a false see home directory,
but you can change that with the command line again, if you want.
And then it's a left click,
and your left click gives you ways of getting into the actual options of Rocks filer itself,
ways of creating new directories,
fast ways of navigating, like, you know,
just the parent of the window you're in,
just a new window of the parent again,
or a new window of the same window you're in.
So you can kick it off very easy,
that's, of course, what you would expect, you know,
the different ways of selecting things,
select a file, clear selections, invert selections,
all kinds of things, you can display things,
all the things you would expect from a regular file manager,
you can sort your displays,
change the size of the icons or your displays,
view the displays, whether where their file sizes,
all that stuff you would normally expect.
But there are a few features that I didn't expect that I really appreciated.
One thing I appreciate was that there's a selection for window,
if you go into there, it will allow you to kick off a bar,
at the bottom of the window,
where you can just enter shell commands
as if you were in that directory.
So you don't have to kick off a X-term window if you don't want to,
and you're using Roxfile,
you can just navigate to the directory you want to be in,
and you have a quick command,
you just choose that shell command thing,
and you can type in the command,
you won't see the normal output that comes,
but the command will execute there.
Now, should you want to actually have a next-term window,
there is, of course, a store terminal here if you want.
It's all up to you,
and that's a very nice piece of flexibility to have.
I use that quite frequently.
So, if you want to check it out,
Google for Roxfile.org or just try installing it.
Like I said, it's an app.
You don't have to use it once it's installing a system.
You can do app to get,
if your Linux distribution supports app,
you can do app to get space install space,
Roxfile.org.
This is in most of your repositories for most of your distributions.
As a matter of fact,
this is the default window manager for Puppy Linux,
which I've heard some criticism about,
but I just find it interesting.
And for those history buffs out there,
Rox, of course, stands for something
as all geeky things,
like name things in acronyms.
Rox stands for Risco S on X.
So, I hope you enjoyed this small and short
episode of Hack a Public Radio from the Deep Geek.
Have a wonderful day.
Thank you for listening to Hack a Public Radio.
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so head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-E-C for all of her team.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.