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The desktop metaphor< is very important for KFM. Many filemanagers in the UNIX world work only in their windows. But KFM gives you a Desktop like OS/2, Apple and ( I hate to say it ) Win NT/95. Files on the desktop work like the ones in the windows. Since KFM supports drag and drop, it is a good idea to use the Desktop for storing some temporary things. On the other hand, it is always nice to have some important icons handy on the Desktop. Well, just do what you want
Templates have been introduced by OS/2. KFM has some - not really that
powerful but never the less nice - feature to support them. All files in the
Templates directory are supposed to be templates ( I think you would not have
guessed that! ). For example, you can move a template for a Lyx
letter, or a default Makefile or whatever. Even complete directory
structures may act as templates. If a project you start always has
the same directory structure, you can create such a structure in the templates
directory. Then you change to the directory where you want to have a new
document/project/what-ever. Open the Menu File
and then the
submenu New
and you will get a list of all installed
templates. Just select one to create it. This way you can create
directories, too. The idea is simple but useful.
These files are important for KFM and kpanel and the whole KDE project.
Such a file can do lots of things for you. For example, it can hold
an URL a device or may stand for a program. Using such a file, you can
mount/unmount devices, make links to URLs on your desktop or just create a
nice icon represantation for an executable. Read the section 'Usage'
to learn more about these files and what they can do for you.
You do not need to know how the files are structured,
because KFM has nice dialogs for you, so you can click some *.kdelnk
files very easily. If you drag a URL pointing to
ftp://ftp.kde.org
on your desktop, KFM will create such a file for
you. Clicking it will open a FTP connection for you.
The Internet is very important for KFM, too. It can be called an
internet desktop since it uses FTP and HTTP. This means that KFM makes no big
differences between files on some FTP server or on your local hard disk. Since
KFM uses HTML to show its output, it has no problem with HTML pages. This means
that you can follow HTML links as you would do with your browser. Indeed
KFM acts like a Web-Browser in many ways. It is indeed a Web-Browser
with integrated file management. The HTML widget is not perfect yet, so some
HTML pages may seem ugly, but it is getting better all the time. As a
result,KFM uses URLs instead of usual file names ( of course you
can use your old fashioned file names, too ). KFM supports an extension to
usual URLs. It features subprotocols. Ususally the user does not have to deal
with them, he may still click around with the mouse. For example,
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/unix/kde.tgz#tar:/kdebase/kfm/main.cpp
is a
valid URL. It defines a tar file on an ftp server and refers to some files in
the tar archive. Clicking on some tar archives will do the job for you.
KFM is highly multi tasking. It has some slave processes running to do the IO stuff. This means that no IO can block your desktop. This is especially important for the Internet. You know that even Netscape can lock up for some seconds. KFM does not have this problem any more. It just locks up if you find a bug.
KFM gives you control over the look of your directories. If it finds a
.kde.html
or index.html
file in your directory it displays
it ( can be turned
off ). There are some HTML extensions that allow you to separate directories
and documents on such a HTML page. You need not write a link for
every file in the HTML page. The HTML extension helps you very much here.
Instead of writing a complete HTML page you can select a background
color/image for some directories and change the color of the font. You may
give executables and directories special icons. Those icon settings are
recognized by kpanel,too. For more details see as usual the
section 'Usage' in the handbook.
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