PCManFM Qt port is 85% finished now!


A picture is worth a thousands words so again let’s see the screenshot first.

PCManFM Qt with desktop manager turned on

This is the Qt port of PCManFM with desktop management feature turned on. The desktop icons and the wallpaper were painted by PCManFM-Qt, just like the gtk+ version of the original PCManFM. The new Qt port is in a pretty good shape now.
Although it’s not yet ready for production use, it’s almost there. About 85% of the planned features are finished.

What already works:
  1. Nearly all folder browsing features
  2. Change icon theme
  3. Preferences dialog (most options work)
  4. Load/save settings
  5. Single instance + dbus service
  6. Command line options
  7. Desktop icon manager: enable with “pcmanfm-qt –desktop”. You can add “pcmanfm-qt –desktop” to the startup script of your desktop environment/window manager.
  8. Change wallpapers via “Desktop Preferences” dialog
  9. Mount remote filesystems and removable devices (requires gvfs)
  10. Split into pcmanfm-qt and libfm-qt library.
  11. Install libfm-qt header files to /usr/includ/libfm-qt along with a pkgconfig file, so later libfm-qt can be used in other Qt programs
  12. Most file operations, move/copy/symlink/trash/rename, change file attributes in the file properties dialog.
  13. Basic drag and drop support (very basic)

Things which do not work or are still work in progress:

  1. Create new folders/files
  2. Edit bookmarks
  3. Auto-mount/auto-run for removable devices
  4. No thumbnail support yet. (This may require some changes of the upstream libfm library)
  5. No ABI version (libtool soname not set yet)
  6. No translations yet (Qt Linguist and the *.ts files are hard to work with and lack features I need, I consider using GNU gettext instead)
Also noted that the git repository is now moved to:
git://pcmanfm.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/pcmanfm/pcmanfm-qt
The original libfm-qt repo will be removed later.
The binary program pcmanfm-qt and the library libfm-qt.so are bundled in the same package.
Please help test and give some comments.
If anyone is interested in helping the development, patches are welcomed.
Thank you!

10 responses to “PCManFM Qt port is 85% finished now!”

  1. Looks really good! I hope the better looks won’t hurt the performance, because that’s why I (and probably many other people) use LXDE 😉 Keep up the good work!

  2. This is great news!
    As a developer I prefer QT to GTK but LXDE is the best lightweight DE and it would be great if we could have a QT version of it.
    The biggest problem I see with going 100% QT is the windows manager because Openbox is GTK.

  3. Andrew: kwin is heading towards independence last time I’ve checked, around Qt5 it should be possible to do it without other KDE at all (might be wrong here)

  4. Hi,

    Can you please explain what is the impact of this news for end users? Does that means PCManFM is currently not good or buggy with GTK ? What is the purpose to port PCManFM to QT?

    Thanks in advance for any help.

  5. […] PCManFM Qt port is 85% finished now! This is the Qt port of PCManFM with desktop management feature turned on. The desktop icons and the wallpaper were painted by PCManFM-Qt, just like the gtk+ version of the original PCManFM. The new Qt port is in a pretty good shape now. Although it’s not yet ready for production use, it’s almost there. About 85% of the planned features are finished. […]

  6. This is a great project, thanks! I’m on Ubuntu 13.04 and wondered why you chose Qt 4 over Qt 5. Is there any specific reason?

    I had to force the compiler to use Qt4 by installing the package qt4-default.
    “make” complained about not findig gio.h and other files which resided in /usr/include/glib-2.0 so i had to copy those headers into /usr/include.

    But now i still have problems compiling libfm-qt: http://pastebin.cc/paste/e1e36711d8e8eea0ea08f462751653184a963a9f#cu5dIX9sHSp02YxZMBNO37XEzkMFDAYHYF2tUWmvsjc=

  7. I’m sorry, you can delete and dismiss my last and this message, i did “make” within libfm-qt and not within the parent directory.

  8. Awesome!!! Great Job. My Thinkpad T43 runs silent and fast as if it was new!!! THANK YOU!