Title: Silas's Corner

ROX Filer (available from rox.sourceforge.net or provided as a package in all major Linux distributions) is a drag-and-drop file manager for Linux that is progressing well. A file manager can be useful if you are trying to browse or re-organise a project that employs files and directories to represent its structure, as opposed to ignoring the filing system and using grep to find everything, which can be tempting when it is necessary to have too many automatically-generated files in the same directory or to utilise mail folders and other databases which do not necessarily use the filing system.

A major advantage of ROX over other file managers is that it is lightweight, while still being graphical. Being lightweight is particularly useful if you are on older hardware or a heavily-used server - you can load and run it without consuming large amounts of RAM or causing a lot of disk activity, which can make it more suitable than KDE or Gnome on such systems.

Some of the user interface ideas have been taken from Acorn's RISC OS, such as automatic window resizing (a directory window is never larger than it needs to be). It doesn't yet have everything that RISC OS has; for example, there are no Director-like menus for rapid browsing of complex directory structures, and the menus that are there do not have all the functionality of RISC OS menus such asthe ability to right-click on an item to select it without dismissing the menu (useful in a complex hierarchy; the GIMP's floating menus can achieve the same thing but they require an extra step). Needless to say there is not as much integration with applications as there is on RISC OS, although some effort is being made to produce applications that do co-operate with ROX, and it's often possible to configure existing applications to send commands to ROX via the command line, which can remotely control an existing instance of ROX as easily as starting a new one. ROX does have some nice touches that are not found in RISC OS, such as briefly flashing the directory you came from when you go up a directory. On balance it is worth knowing about. ROX is reasonably customisable, and hopefully in future it will have better support for unusual characters in filenames.