Fluff Updates

[MikeLockmoore]

I'm resuming development of Fluff, the FLTK-based two-pane file browser that I first wrote over ten years ago and is in the extensions repo.  The current version has a minor issue where the file sorting indicator triangle symbols are overlapping part of the file details column name.  So my first order of business was to fix that, which I did by putting a little bit of space in the front of each column header. Easy-Peasy!

Actually, before I did that, I fixed up a case statement with a missing break statement that was leading to compiler warnings that Rich had suppressed.  I went in and made sure I hadn't originally intended a fall through (sure doesn't seem like it), so I put in a break statement and took out the pragmas added in recent years. 

Next I went to work on making the UI scalable, since I'm running TC on a 14-inch laptop screen with 1920x1080 resolution and many apps are nearly unusable at their default font sizes with my not-young eyes.  The aterm app is easy to configure to use a larger font, but the FLTK apps are mostly hard-coded to a certain size that I'm sure was chosen to be usable on modest hardware (SVGA?  or maybe even standard VGA at 640x480?) but makes them really small on high-resolution screens. 

Anyway, now my experimental build of Fluff will load a scaling parameter and size everything accordingly.  Well, the main window does, as seen in the screenshot with both the current release of Fluff (1.0.9) and my new build (1.0.10?) configured to 200%.  If you look closely, you can also see the file sorting indicator fix.  I think I'm more likely to set it to 150% on this laptop, but I imagine some people will appreciate the flexibility this offers.

I have some time off in coming days, so I hope to roll this scaling feature throughout the remainder of the Fluff GUI elements like right-click menus, properties dialog box, etc. and be ready to offer a new release soon.  Stay tuned! 

[nick65go]

Welcome back!
I use also a "new" laptop (HP EliteBook G5, from 2018, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD  ), with resolution 1920x1080 on 13.5 inch display, so I have the same problem (aka old eyes for small screen + high resolution). Someone says (PDP-8 ?): RAM not used is wasted RAM (same for HDD), but I do not fully agree it, so tinycore stay as an option yet.

FYI: It is also a pain with any TC fltk GUI applets; for aterm I set the font at 10x20 alias (or maybe 9x15), because default 7x13 is too small.

My suggestions for you, optionally of course     
1. Could you check please that the menus to assign file-extension is working properly? It was not, until Rich patched it, (fluff crashed); but unfortunately (if I remember correctly) the latest functional version is in TC12_x64, not in TC13 neither inTC14.
2.  Fluff has SLOW speed in listing/refreshing directories with huge files. I compared it with xfe (file manager); you can check for yourself (ex. for/usr/local/lib/*)
3. Flush crashes/closes in manual navigation into LONG-PATH (ex: /lib/modules/kernel/drivers/...).

Good luck.

[nick65go]

I fixed up a case statement with a missing break statement that was leading to compiler warnings

Is it true that developers could now submit their source-code (subprograms) to chatGPT and the A.I. will check the program for correct syntax and comment on proposed changes?

[MikeLockmoore]

Welcome back!
...

My suggestions for you, optionally of course     
1. Could you check please that the menus to assign file-extension is working properly? It was not, until Rich patched it, (fluff crashed); but unfortunately (if I remember correctly) the latest functional version is in TC12_x64, not in TC13 neither inTC14.
2.  Fluff has SLOW speed in listing/refreshing directories with huge files. I compared it with xfe (file manager); you can check for yourself (ex. for/usr/local/lib/*)
3. Flush crashes/closes in manual navigation into LONG-PATH (ex: /lib/modules/kernel/drivers/...).

Good luck.

Thanks for your support and suggestions!  I'll definitely look into them.  There are a few functions where I "subcontract" the processing work to little shell scripts so Fluff did not need as much native code... but perhaps that is leading to a significant performance hit.  But it could be anything, I suppose. 

As for item three... how are you manually navigating exactly?  I can "drill down" into the /lib/modules directory tree level by level and get to "/lib/modules/6.1.2-tinycore64/kernel/drivers/usb/typec/mux" at least without a problem.  the current "Path" control in on the right end of the button bar area of the Fluff window does not allow direct editing.  Do old versions allow that? I don't recall at this point.