The Directory Panes

Introduction

In gentoo's main window, there are always exactly two directories being shown. The directories are displayed in sub-windows inside the main window; each such sub-window is called a directory pane. Between the panes is a small handle which allows you to adjust the relative size of the two panes, this is sometimes useful when one pane is more interesting than the other.

The pane also provides scrollbars for navigating inside it; these are only shown when actually needed. As soon as all information fits on-screen, the scrollbars disappear.

Below the file listing, a text box showing the path to the displayed directory is shown. To move to another directory directly (without clicking through the hierarchy), you can click in this box and type the path. When you press <Return>, gentoo will attempt to go to the named directory. If you begin the path with a dollar sign ($) and then the name of an environment variable, gentoo will look up the value of the variable and use that instead. For example, on many systems you can enter $HOME to go to your own home directory.

Current Pane

One of the two panes is always the current one. The active pane has the background color of its column buttons set to some distinct color. In the screenshot, it should be easy to see that the pane on the left is current.

To make a pane current, you can:

1. Click in it. This will also select the item hit, if any.
2. Click on one of its scrollbars, if any is displayed.
3. Click in its path entry text box.
4. Envoke the ActivateOther built-in command, currently always bound to the <Space Bar> key.

Pane Columns

For each row in a pane, gentoo displays a selection of information. Which information is displayed, in in what order, is fully user configurable, see the chapter on configuring gentoo for details. The information is divided into columns; a column displays the same piece of information for all of the rows in a pane. Examples of columns include name, size, owner, various dates, and type. There are almost 20 different types of column content available for you to choose from! For a rundown on these, see the column content reference table.

A directory listing in gentoo is always kept sorted in order to make it easier for you to locate the files of interest. Sorting is always done on a specific column of the pane. The default is to sort on file names. It is often helpful to sort on size, to quickly locate the largest files in a directory for example. You can change all about the sorting in the configuration window, but there's a quicker way: just click on a column heading (the gray boxes showing column content titles) and gentoo will switch the sorting of the pane to the column you clicked. Click again and the sorting becomes inverted, i.e. it sorts from Z-A rather than A-Z.

Each pane can have its own sorting configuration.

Selecting Files

Before you can operate upon any files, you need to tell gentoo which files are of interest. This is done by selecting the files (or directories, links, devices...) in question. Each pane maintains its own set of selected files independently from the other.

The simplest, and most commonly used, way to select a file is to place the mouse cursor anywhere in the file thof as "out of", so the first pair of digits, 0/18 in the screenshot, mean that 0 out of 18 directories have been selected. If you bother to count this manually, you'll see that there are actually 18 directories shown, and no directory seems to be selected either, so this is probably correct. Then, by direct analogy, the rest of the stuff must be correct too...

You might be amused (or annoyed) by the fact that the selected file sizes try to adapt the amount of bytes selected. This means that the precision and unit shown will change as you select more and more, going from "X bytes" to "X KB", over "X MB" and finally up to "X GB". If you are one of those people who just can't stand this kind of seemingly chaotic behaviour, you'll be glad to know that a future version of gentoo is likely to make the status bar contents configurable, too. Till then, chill. ;^)

Command Status

Whenever you execute a command, such as copy a file, gentoo will report the command's exit status in the status line. For the most part, commands should succeed, and you will just see the single word "OK" in the status line. This is gentoo's way of signalling that the requested operation was carried out without complications.

If the command execution should fail for some reason (perhaps you don't have write permission in the destination directory), gentoo will complain with a line looking something like this:

The information given in the command status line is:

• Operation that failed ("Copy")
• Destination file for operation ("/.test.file")
• The reason for the failure ("Permission denied")
• The operating system error code for this failure (13)

The idea is that the information shown shall help you understand what caused the problem, so that you can do something about it.