AW-FM

Awused's personal gui file manager.

It is a simple file manager designed to be fast and efficient at doing what I actually do.

Features

• Fast and efficient
  • Opening directories containing hundreds of thousands of images shouldn't lock up the UI for minutes/hours.
• Natural sorting, abc sorts before XYZ and a2.png sorts before a10.png.
• Highly customizable, up to a point.
  • A reasonably complete set of text commands to control the application.
  • Define custom shortcuts, custom bookmarks, and custom context menu actions.
• A UI charitably described as minimal.
  • Panes/splits and tab groups function like minimal workspaces.
• Custom actions showing up in context menus.
  • Just flat scripts, easy to write and back up.
• Seeking inside a directory or search results without requiring a full search.
• Session saving and loading.
• Not much more, anything I don't personally use doesn't get implemented.
  • Will not cover every use case, like mounting external drives.

Installation and Usage

Clone the repository and run make install to install aw-fm and the extra files in the desktop directory to their default locations. Alternately run cargo install --git https://github.com/awused/aw-fm --locked and install those extra files manually.

Run with aw-fm or your application launcher of choice.

Optionally edit the config in aw-fm.toml.sample and copy it to ~/.config/aw-fm/aw-fm.toml.

Dependencies

Required:

• GTK - GTK4 libraries and development headers must be installed.
• gnome-desktop utility libraries

On fedora all required dependencies can be installed with dnf install gtk4-devel gnome-desktop4-devel.

Shortcuts

Defaults

The defaults should make some level of sense. Hit ? for a popup containing all current customizable keybinds.

Mouse controls are not customizable but should work as expected. Middle clicking on a file or directory is the same as the NewBackgroundTab command below. Control clicking on a tab will open it in a horizontal split, shift clicking leads to a vertical split.

Customization

Custom Actions

Custom actions are enabled by scripts in the actions directory, default $HOME/.config/aw-fm/actions/. Depending on how they are configured they do not always appear in the context menu.

They must be executable text files and options are read from within the file. See the example script for an explanation of the options.

Custom actions behave as if run by Script: any output will be treated as a newline-separated series of commands to run. See below for more details.

Commands

Keyboard shortcuts, bookmarks, and context menu entries can be customized in aw-fm.toml. See the comments in the config file for how to specify them.

• Help
  • List current keybinds.
• Quit
• Refresh/RefreshAll
  • Refreshes all visible or all tabs.
  • This shouldn't be necessary unless file system notifies are incomplete, like over NFS.
• Activate
  • The same as hitting enter or double clicking on the selected file(s).
  • This will run executable files or open non-executable files in their default applications.
  • It is not recommended to bind this as a shortcut.
• OpenDefault
  • Opens the selected files in their default applications.
  • Will not run executable files.
• OpenWith
  • Spawns a fairly standard "Open With" dialog to select the application.
  • Allows changing the default application.
• Cut/Copy
  • Cuts or copies the current selection.
  • Will set the clipboard even if nothing is selected.
• Paste
  • Pastes into the active tab.
  • Can receive cuts and copies from aw-fm, caja, or nautilus.
  • Using this in scripts would be odd.
• Trash
  • Moves the selected items to trash.
  • aw-fm doesn't have utilities to manage trash.
• Delete
  • Spawns a confirmation dialog before permanently deleting the selected items.
  • As a special case, Scripts can only run Delete on the currently active tab and it will fail if the active tab has changed without ClearTarget.
• Rename
  • Spawns a rename dialog for the current file.
• Properties
  • Opens a fairly standard properties dialog for the current selection.

Navigation Commands

• Navigate directory/file
  • Navigates the current tab to a directory or jumps to a file in that directory.
  • Opens a new tab if one isn't active.active
• Home
  • Navigates to the user's home directory.
• JumpTo path
  • Jumps to the parent directory of path and scrolls so that path is visible.
  • Opens a new tab if one isn't active.
• Forward and Back
  • Navigates through the history of the active tab.
• Parent
  • Navigates to the parent of the current directory.
• Child
  • Navigates into a child directory of the current directory if there is only one or if you previously navigated from a subdirectory of the current directory.
  • Parent followed by Child will return you to the same directory.
• Search [query]
  • Opens a recursive search in the current directory.
  • Searching requires at least three characters and uses a simple substring match.
  • For more powerful/flexible searching, use an external program like rofi or fzf.

Tabs

• NewTab [directory|file] and NewBackgroundTab [directory/file]
  • Opens a new tab in the foreground or background.
  • If directory or file is set, it will behave like Navigate.
  • By default it will clone the current tab or the user's home directory.
  • Examples: Navigate /path/to/directory Navigate /path/to/file.png
• CloseTab
  • Close the active tab.
  • Closing the pane of a tab inside a group will remove that tab from the group.
• CloseTabNoReplacement
  • Like CloseTab, but if the tab was the only visible tab it does not open a replacement.
• ClosePane
  • Hides the current pane.
  • If that tab was part of a tab group, also removes the tab from that group.
• HidePanes
  • Hides all visible panes. Does not remove any tabs from groups.
• ReopenTab
  • Reopens the last closed tabs in reverse order.
• Split horizontal|vertical
  • Splits the current tab in two, creating or adding to the existing group.
  • The new tab is on the right or bottom of the split.
  • If no tabs are visible, opens a new one.
  • In Scripts, if the target tab is no longer visible, does nothing.
• SaveSession name, LoadSession name, and DeleteSession name
  • Saves, loads, or deletes the current session.
  • Only currently saves the list of open tabs.

Display Settings

• Display icons|columns
  • Changes the display mode of the current directory.
• SortBy name|mtime|size
• SortDir ascending|descending
  • Change how the current directory is sorted.

Other

• Execute
  • Requires a single string argument which will be run as an executable.
  • Example: Execute /path/to/some-program
• Script
  • Like Execute but reads stdout from the executable as a series of commands to run, one per line.
  • These programs will be killed on exit from aw-fm.
  • Example: Script /path/to/sample-script.sh if the script prints "Quit" the program will exit.
• Cancel
  • Cancels all ongoing operations (copies, moves, deletions, etc).
  • Any changes that have already been made or are in flight are not reversed.
  • If multiple operations are ongoing their ordering for Undo is not defined.
• Undo
  • Undoes the last completed file operation (copy, move, deletion, rename, etc).
  • Undoing is best effort but pessimistic to avoid destroying data.
  • Copies are deleted and moves are reversed. A move will not be undone if a new file was created with the original path, but copies that overwrote existing files will still be deleted.
  • Not all operations or actions can be undone. Deletion is not undoable and trashing is currently not undoable.
• ClearTarget
  • Changes the target for later commands from whatever the active tab was when the script was called to whatever the active tab is currently.
  • Only useful in the context of custom actions or Script calls.

External Executable Environment

The executables from Execute, Script, and custom actions will be called with no arguments and several environment variables set. rofi-jump-home.sh is an example that opens rofi to navigate to a subdirectory inside the user's home directory.

All of these variables may be empty or absent. They are not updated in response to actions taken by the script or the user while the script is running, so they may become stale.

Environment Variable	Explanation
AWFM_CURRENT_TAB_PATH	The currently selected tab, which is also the current pane.
AWFM_CURRENT_TAB_SEARCH	The currently selected tab's search.
AWFM_SELECTION	A newline-separated list of selected files in the current displayed sort order. Scripts that run against directories may need to check both AWFM_SELECTION and AWFM_CURRENT_TAB_PATH to decide what to operate on.
AWFM_NEXT_TAB_PATH	The next(lower) tab as visually seen in the tabs list on the left. If tabs are open but no panes are open, this will be the first tab.
AWFM_NEXT_TAB_SEARCH	See above.
AWFM_PREV_TAB_PATH	The previous(higher) tab as visually seen in the tabs list on the left. If tabs are open but no panes are open, this will be absent.
AWFM_PREV_TAB_SEARCH	See above.

By default commands run in the context of tab that was active when they spawn. Calling ClearTarget will instead run them in the context of the currently active tab, even if it changes.

This script will open a new tab and close the previous tab, if any was open, since CloseTab will run in the context of whatever tab was initially open.

echo NewTab
echo CloseTab

This script will open a new tab and then immediately close the new tab, leaving whatever tab was open initially untouched.

echo ClearTarget
echo NewTab
echo CloseTab

Building on Windows

Not planned, good luck. Probably won't work even if the trivial things like unix-only imports are fixed.

Development

• RUST_LOG=Trace for spam
• GTK_DEBUG=Interactive
• G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=GnomeDesktop for thumbnailer issues or G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=All

Why

Gui file managers on Linux are almost all descended from Nautilus and have similar characteristics including performance traps and a lack of customization. They do, however, support things I probably won't, like automount and udev.

Screenshots

Panes and tab groups Support for transparent backgrounds Media properties for most formats