Ubuntu Manpage: gentoo - A highly configurable file manager for X

name
synopsis
description
options
basic usage
configuration
files
bugs
author
acknowledgments
copyright
other info
see also

NAME

       gentoo - A highly configurable file manager for X

SYNOPSIS

       gentoo  [--version]  [--locale-info]  [--root-ok] [--no-rc] [--no-gtkrc] [--no-dir-history] [--left=path]
       [--right=path] [--run=ARG]

DESCRIPTION

gentoo is a file manager for Linux and compatible systems. It allows you to interactively navigate your
file system using the mouse, and also to perform various fairly standard operations (such as copy, move,
rename, ...) on the files and directories contained therein.

gentoo always shows you the contents of two directories at once. Each of these is displayed in its own
scrollable list, called a pane. At any time, exactly one pane is the current pane, and has a highlighted
bar running across its top region. The current pane acts as the source for all file operations, while the
other pane is the destination. You can select rows in panes using selection methods of varying complexity
(from simply clicking a row, to selecting rows by name using a regular expression). Once you have a
selection, you can click a button to perform some command on the selected files.

All file operations performed by gentoo are implemented natively. When you use gentoo to copy a file, for
example, gentoo does not simply execute the system's cp(1L) command. Rather, gentoo contains its own code
for opening source and destination files, and then reading and writing the right amount of data between
them. This way of doing things makes gentoo independent of the availability of shell commands to do
things.

gentoo incorporates a fairly powerful, object-oriented file typing and styling system. It can use a
variety of ways to determine the type of the files it is displaying. Each type is then linked to
something called a style, which controls how rows of that type are rendered in panes. You can use this
system to control icons, colors, and various operations on the rows. For example, it is easy to make
gentoo display all PNG images in red, and to invoke The GIMP(1) on them when double-clicked.

A design goal with gentoo has been to provide full GUI configurability, removing the need to edit a
configuration file by hand and restart the program to see the changes, as is otherwise common in many
programs for Un*x. As a result of this, gentoo features a Configuration dialog window where you can
configure most aspects of its operation directly, using the mouse and standard GUI widgets.

gentoo borrows its basic look'n'feel from the classic Amiga file manager Directory OPUS, but is not a
"clone" of any kind.

OPTIONS

gentoo is not primarily driven by command line arguments, but the following are available:

--version
Causes gentoo to print its version number (a string of the form MAJOR.MINOR.MICRO, like 0.20.6) to
the standard output, and then exit successfully. Numbers having an odd MINOR component indicate
development versions of the program. So far, all versions of gentoo have been classified as being
development versions.

--locale-info
Makes gentoo print a couple of localization settings, and then exit. This is mostly useful during
development and debugging, and not of a lot of interest when just using the application.

--root-ok
Makes gentoo accept being run by the root user. Normally, this is not allowed since it is
considered a big threat to system security. Note that gentoo has the ability to execute user-
defined strings using the execvp(3) function. This is generally considered harmful. However, if
you really want to run gentoo while logged on as root, supplying this option allows you to. It is
not recommended, though.

--no-rc
Starts up gentoo without loading any configuration file. This makes it run using the built-in
defaults, which are very Spartan indeed. Seldom comfortable, but occasionally handy when trying to
determine if a problem is with the configuration or with the core code.

--no-gtkrc
Avoids loading the GTK+ RC file, thus disabling any widget customizations, and forces all widgets
to use the default GTK+ look.

--no-dir-history
Avoids loading the file that holds the history, i.e. which directories have been previously
visited by the two panes. Very rarely needed, included mostly for completeness' sake.

--left, --right (or -1, -2)
Sets the initial path for the left and right pane, respectively. If present, the path specified
with one of these options overrides any other path for the pane in question. See below (Initial
Directory Paths) for details.

--run ARG (or -rARG)
Runs ARG, a gentoo command. Commands specified this way are executed before gentoo accepts any
user input through the graphical interface, but after the configuration file has been read in. You
can use it many times in order to make gentoo run a whole series of commands. Remember that
gentoo's command names are case-sensitive, and that built-in commands (like "About") always begin
with a capital letter.

Any non-option command arguments will be silently ignored. If an argument "-h" or "--help" is given,
gentoo will give a summary of its supported command line options and exit successfully. If an unknown
option is given, or a option is missing a required argument, gentoo will whine and exit with a failure.

BASIC USAGE

When gentoo starts up, it will open up its single main window, which is split vertically (or
horizontally; it's configurable) down the middle, forming the two panes mentioned above. It also contains
a bank of buttons along the bottom.

Initial Directory Paths
The actual paths shown in the two panes upon start-up can be controlled in various ways. There are four
ways of getting a path to show up in pane. In order of decreasing priority, they are:

1. Command-line Argument
Using the --left and --right (or their short forms, -1 and -2) command-line arguments overrides
any other setting.

2. Configured Default Directory
If no command-line argument is present, and the "Default Directory" configuration option is set,
that directory is used.

3. Most Recently Visited Directory
If no default directory exists, the most recently visited directory is taken from the directory
history for each pane. This only works if a directory history file has been found and loaded.

4. Current Directory
If all else fails, gentoo uses the current directory (".").

Navigating
Navigating around the file system using gentoo is very simple. The two panes act as independent views of
the file system, and both are navigated in exactly the same way.

You can always see which directory a pane is showing by reading its path, shown in the entry box below
(by default--you can change the position to above) the pane.

To enter a directory, locate it in the pane and double click it with the left mouse button. gentoo will
read the directory's contents, and update the display accordingly.

There are several ways of going up in the directory structure. To enter the directory containing the one
currently shown (the current dir's parent), you can: click the parent button (to the left of the path
entry box); hit Backspace on your keyboard; click the middle mouse button; select "Parent" from the pop-
up menu on the right mouse button, or click the downward arrow to the right of the path box (this pops up
the directory history menu), then select the second row from the top.

Selecting Files
Before you can do anything to a file, you need to select it. All file-management commands in gentoo act
upon the current selection (in the current pane). There are several ways of selecting files, but the most
frequently used are mouse-based. Note that the word "file" used below really should be taken to mean
"file or directory", since selection doesn't distinguish between the two.

To select a file (or directory), just point the mouse at the name (anywhere in the row is fine), and
click the left mouse button. The colors of the clicked row will change, indicating that it is currently
selected. To select more rows, keep the mouse button down, and drag the mouse vertically. gentoo extends
the selection, including all rows touched. If you drag across the top or bottom border, the pane will
scroll, trying to keep up. This is a very quick and convenient way of selecting multiple files, as long
as they are listed in succession.

If you click again on an already selected file, you will unselect it. You can drag to unselect several
files, just as when selecting.

To select a sequence of files without dragging, first click normally on the first file that you wish to
select. Then release the mouse button, locate the last file in the sequence (it can be either above or
below the first one), hold down shift on your keyboard, and click the wanted file. gentoo now adds all
files between the first and the last to the current selection.

If you follow the instructions given above to select a sequence, but press control rather than shift
before clicking the second time, gentoo will unselect the range of files indicated.

If you click on a file with the meta key held down (that's actually a key labeled Alt, located to the
immediate left of the space bar, on my PC keyboard), gentoo will do something cool: it will select (or
unselect, it's a toggle just like ordinary selection) all files, including the clicked one, that have the
same type as the one you clicked. This can be used to select for example all PNG image files in a
directory even if you can only see one. Occasionally very useful.

If you click on a file with both the shift and control keys held down, gentoo will toggle the selected
state of all files having the same file name extension as the one you clicked. This can sometimes be
useful to select files that you don't have a proper type defined for, as long as those files do share an
extension, that is.

Changing Sort Order
The files and directories listed in each of gentoo's two panes are always sorted on some column:
typically file name. You can chose to sort on some other field by clicking the appropriate column title
once. If you click on the field that is already current, the sorting will be reversed (i.e., for names it
will be Z-A rather than A-Z).

If your display includes icons, try sorting on that column: gentoo will then order each row according to
its File Style, grouping the rows based on their parent styles, all the way up to the root of the Style
tree. This means that, for example, JPEG and PNG pictures (both having an immediate parent style of
Image) will be shown together, and before all Text files (HTML, man pages and so on). It's quite cool,
really. :)

Executing Commands
Commands are used to make gentoo do stuff. The typical command operates upon the set of selected files in
the current pane, so it's usually a good idea to first select some files. See the previous subsection for
details on how to select files. Once you have a bunch of files selected, you need to tell gentoo which
command to execute. There are several ways of doing this.

Most basic file operations (e.g. copy, move, rename, and so on) are found on the (cleverly labeled)
buttons along the bottom of gentoo's main window. To copy a file, just select it, then click the button
labeled "Copy". It's really that simple. Most of these built-in (or native) commands automatically
operate recursively on directories, so you could copy (or move) a whole directory of files by just
selecting it and then clicking "Copy".

If you can't see a button that does what you want to do, there's a chance that the command exists, but
isn't bound. Click the right mouse button in a pane, this opens up the "pane pop-up menu". Select the
"Run..." item. This opens up a dialog window showing all available commands. Select a command, and click
"OK" to execute it.

CONFIGURATION

       gentoo  is a pretty complicated program; it has a rather large amount of configuration data that it needs
       in order to be really useful. For example, my current personal configuration file contains  well  over  a
       thousand different configuration values.

       To store this hefty amount of configuration data, gentoo uses a heavily structured configuration file. In
       fact, the file is (or at least it should be) legal XML!

       When new features are added to gentoo, they will typically require some form of configuration data.  This
       data  is  then  simply  added  somewhere  in the existing configuration file structure. Effort is made to
       assign reasonable built-in default values for all such new features, so older configuration  files  (that
       don't  contain  the values required by the new features) should still work. The first time you hit "Save"
       in the configuration window after changing your version of gentoo, your personal configuration file  will
       be updated to match the version of gentoo.

       Describing  how  to  go about configuring gentoo is too big a topic for a manual page to cover. I'll just
       say that the command to open up the  configuration  window  is  called  "Configure".  It  is  by  default
       available  on a button (typically the top-right one), in the pane pop-up menu, and also by pressing the C
       key on your keyboard.

FILES

~/.config/gentoo/gentoorc
A user's personal configuration file. When gentoo starts up, it will try to load this file. If the
file isn't found, the old name ~/.gentoorc is tested, and if that also fails a site-wide
configuration (see below) will be tried instead.

/etc/gentoorc
This is the site-wide configuration file. If a user doesn't have a configuration in his/her home
directory, gentoo loads this file instead. The actual location of this file is slightly system-
dependent, the above is the default. As an end user, you typically won't need to access this file
manually.

~/.config/gentoo/dirhistory
This file contains lists of the most recently visited directories, for both panes. These are the
lists that appear in the drop-down menu when the arrow next to the path entry box is clicked. Can
be disabled in the Dir Pane configuration.

~/.config/gentoo/gtkrc
This file allows you to control the look of the widgets used by gentoo, through the GTK+ style
system. You can change the actual path in gentoo's Configuration window, the above is the typical
default for a modern Linux-based system. If a file named gtkrc is not found in the configured
path, the names gentoogtkrc and .gentoogtkrc (note the period), in that order, are also tested.

/etc/passwd, /etc/group
These two files normally hold the system's password and group information. These are (probably)
the ones gentoo uses to map user IDs to login names, to do tilde-expansion (mapping of user name
to directory path), and to map group IDs to group names. That is probably, because gentoo doesn't
actually refer to these files by name. Instead, it uses the (BSD-style) API function calls
getpwent(3) and getgrent(3) to access this information.

/etc/fstab, /proc/mounts, (or /etc/mtab)
These files contain data on available and mounted file systems. They are read by gentoo's auto-
mounting code. You can configure the exact file names used, on the "Mounting" tab in the main
configuration window. Note that using /proc/mounts rather than /etc/mtab is recommended on Linux
systems; they contain roughly the same data, but the one in /proc is always up to date, and faster
to read!

BUGS

All releases of gentoo numbered 0.x.y, where x (the so called minor version number) is odd, are to be
considered development releases, as opposed to stable ones. This means that the software will probably
suffer from bugs. If you find something that you suspect is indeed a bug, please don't hesitate to
contact the author! For details on how to do this, see below.

If you're concerned about using potentially buggy and completely unwarranted software to manage your
precious files, please feel free not to use gentoo. The world is full of alternatives.

The chances that a bug gets fixed increase greatly if you report it. When reporting a bug, you must
describe how to reproduce it, and also try to be as detailed and precise as possible in your description
of the actual bug. If possible, perhaps you should include the output of gdb(1) (or whatever your
system's debugger is called). In some cases it might be helpful if you include the configuration file you
were using when the problem occurred. Before reporting a bug, please make sure that you are running a
reasonably recent version of the software, since otherwise "your" bug might already been fixed. See below
for how to obtain new releases.

Also, you should locate and read through the BUGS file distributed with gentoo, so you don't go through
all this hassle just to report an already known bug, thereby wasting everybody's time...

AUTHOR

       gentoo was written, from scratch, by Emil Brink. The first line of code was written on May 15th, 1998. It
       is my first program to use the GTK+ GUI toolkit, my first program to be released under the GPL, and  also
       my first really major Linux application.

       The    only    efficient    way    to    contact    me    (to   report   bugs,   give   praise,   suggest
       features/fixes/extensions/whatever) is by Internet e-mail. My address is <emil@obsession.se>.  Please try
       and  include  the word "gentoo" in the Subject part of your e-mail, to help me organize my inbox. Thanks.
       If you're really not in the mood for the direct feel of e-mail, the second best choice for reporting bugs
       and  making suggestions is the use the web-based bug tracker at <https://sourceforge.net/p/gentoo/bugs/>.
       Thanks for contributing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

       The author wishes to thank the following people for their various contributions to gentoo:

       Johan Hanson (<johan@tiq.com>)
              Johan is the man behind all icon graphics in gentoo, and also the author  of  the  custom  widgets
              used  in  it. He also comes up with plenty of ideas for new features and changes to old ones, some
              of which are even implemented. Johan has stuff at <http://www.bahnhof.se/~misagon/>.

       Jonas Minnberg (<sasq@nightmode.org>)
              Jonas did intensive testing of  early  versions  of  gentoo,  and  eventually  persuaded  me  into
              releasing it (back around version 0.9.7 or so).

       Ulf Petterson (<ulf@obsession.se>)
              Ulf drew the main gentoo logo (the one shown in the About window), and also designed the main HTML
              documentation's layout.

       Josip Rodin (<jrodin@jagor.srce.hr>)
              Maintainer of the gentoo  package  for  Debian  Linux,  and  also  a  source  of  suggestions  for
              improvements, as well as a relay for bug reports from Debian Linux users.

       Ryan Weaver (<ryanw@infohwy.com>)
              Maintainer  of  the  gentoo  packages  for  Red Hat Linux, and probably one of the fastest package
              creators out there. :)

       Oliver Braun, Jim Geovedi and Pehr Johansson
              Maintainers of gentoo ports to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, respectively.

       Thanks also to all people who have mailed me about gentoo, providing bug reports, feature  requests,  and
       the occasional kind word. :^) It's because of people like yourselves that we have this wonderful computer
       platform to play with.

COPYRIGHT

       gentoo is released as free, open-source software, under the terms of the GNU General Public License  (GNU
       GPL),  version 2. This license is included in the distribution under the traditional name of COPYING, and
       I suggest that you read it if you're not familiar with it. If you can't find the file, but have  Internet
       access,  you  could  take a look at <http://www.gnu.org/>.  It is important to realize that the mentioned
       license means that there is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY for this software.

OTHER INFO

       Some unfinished, outdated, but still pretty informative documentation is available, in  HTML  format,  in
       the  docs/  subdirectory  in  the distribution archive. If you haven't installed gentoo from the original
       .tar.gz distribution archive, you might need to either inspect the distribution you did use  (perhaps  it
       came as some form of "package"), or contact a system administrator.

       The  GTK+  GUI  toolkit  that  gentoo  requires  is  available at <http://www.gtk.org/>.  gentoo uses the
       slightly outdated stable series, called 1.2.x. The latest known release in that series  is  GTK+  1.2.10.
       Because  of  severe  performance  problems, gentoo will probably not be ported to use the current (2.0.x)
       series of GTK+ any time soon.

       The  latest  version  of  gentoo  is  always  available  on   the   official   gentoo   home   page,   at
       <http://www.obsession.se/gentoo/>.