PCMan File Manager - Speed up your file management

What's PCMan File Manager or PCManFM?

An extremly fast, lightweight, yet feature-rich file manager with tabbed browsing
The default file manager for the lightweight desktop environment, LXDE
It's named PCManFM after its author's nickname on the internet, PCMan.

Exciting News

Due to some limitations and unresolved bugs of the original PCManFM included in LXDE, its author, 洪任諭 (Hong Jen Yee), decided to totally redesign and rewrite the whole program. Currently there is already some visible progress. Most of the planned features already work or at least partially work. So unless there are critical bugs or security problems, the original PCManFM 0.5.1 won't be updated recently. Nor will bug reports or feature requests be handled now. So hold your breath, stay tunned, and give us some time.

You can grab the latest source code in development for testing and previewing from the git repo with following command line.

Source code of libfm (required to compile pcmanfm):

git clone git://pcmanfm.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/pcmanfm/libfm

Source code of new pcmanfm (This is a total re-write. If you need source code of old deprecated pcmanfm series, please check it out from svn repository.):

git clone git://pcmanfm.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/pcmanfm/pcmanfm

Please install libfm before compiling pcmanfm. Libfm itself brings an standalone demo program named libfm-demo, which could work as a minimal file manager. Both libfm and pcmanfm can be compiled with following commands:

./configure --sysconfdir=/etc
make
sudo make install

Goals of Next Generation PCManFM

Support glib/gio and gvfs but still keep the original performance and memory usage.
I know many people don't believe this and think using gio/gvfs from gnome will make it slower and heavier. Indeed many program using gio/gvfs/gnome are slow, but trust me our PCManFM won't be one of them. Many people said that GTK+ programs are slow and not lightweight, but as you know, PCManFM already prooved that they are wrong.
Seamless access to remote file systems such as sftp, smb, and ftp (provide by gvfs)
Trash can support (provided by gvfs)
Separate the core functionality to create an independent library named libfm for use in other desktop applications and make it a seperate project
Better drag and drop handling and supports XDS (X direct save)
Smaller code size and better structure
Better compatibility with other programs (Due to use of glib/gio)
Make best use of the new features provided in the latest gtk+
Better desktop and volume management
Use the file manager widgets provided in libfm to replace the default file dialogs in gtk+ by preload the lib with LD_PRELOAD
Gvfs dependency is only optional. If the dependencies of gvfs is not acceptible, we would like to fork gvfs and provide a stripped down version without gnome dependency. (long term goal, low priority)

If everything goes smoothly, the next generation PCManFM should be ready for release at the end of 2009 or Q1 of 2010.

PCMan File Manager - Speed up your file management

What's PCMan File Manager or PCManFM?

Exciting News

Goals of Next Generation PCManFM

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