File Directory Tree browsing

[William LeFebvre]

> Is it just me, or are system-software developers trying to make our lives
> harder?  Visualizing and browsing a file tree is difficult.  In unix,

It's not just you.  I agree!  I haven't seen a decent directory browsing
system on Unix yet.

However, I do have a suggestive pointer.  A guy by the name of Peter da
Silva wrote a program called "browser" for the Amiga Workbench (I haven't
seen the UK browser system, so I don't know if it is related).  It
displays one window per directory, with a scrollbar on the right to scroll
through the filenames.  Double click on a directory (any directory from
any window) and it opens up another overlapping window for that directory.
The new window is usually placed so that you can see all the title tabs
for all the windows---a window's title is it's pathname.  Windows don't go
away unless you explicitly close them.  Browser has menu selections for
renaming, duplicating, deleting, etc.  You can move and copy files around
within the system just by dragging their names.  It also has the ability
to set up programs as "Tools".  A tool's name is added to one of the
menus.  For example:  add "more" as a tool, select a file by clicking on
it, then choose "more" from the menu and browser starts up "more" with
that file as an argument.  Multiple selection (with shift click) works in
the obvious way.

I really like this paradigm: it's the best system I've seen yet for
perusing a directory tree.  Obviously, some things would be different
under Unix, and I think that serious perusing on a filesystem as large as
Unix systems can get might prove to be a little cumbersome with all those
windows.  One thing it doesn't have which I wish it did was the ability to
close all windows assoiated with a given directory and all its desendents
(kind of a "recursive close").

If anyone wants more details, drop me a line and I will send you the doc
file or answer questions as I can.

	William LeFebvre
	Sun-Spots moderator
	Department of Computer Science
	Rice University
	<phil at Rice.edu>
	("My home computer is an Amiga")