TWM Xfe - An old fashioned file explorer

When using TWM I always want to maintain the uniformity and consistency of the environment.
This is not a sophisticated environment like modern KDE, Gnome, Xfce ... But it's an environment that has had its days of glory and sophistication.

Some tools help give a more "techno" feel to this file manager.

One such tool is Xfe - a very lightweight and simple file manager that follows the MC approach (Norton Commander for unices).

It does not have many sophistications, but it has some features that help like the "terminal button" and the panning of panels.

However ... Today I needed to access a filesystem on a remote server via ssh ... And unfortunately it does not do it directly.

My solution:

I have used (learned) sshfs(1). I just put the remote file in a directory that I have access to and navigate through it using Xfe.

Simple and practical.
me@local$ sshfs remote.server:/home/target /local/mountpoint


In this case I did not use the 'user@' before remote.server because I have direct access to the remote sshd.

The bottom line is that when we try to solve this kind of common problem, we end up looking for "advanced features" when the solution is simpler than installing a super-dupper-bloated utility to do our brainwork.

Result:
xfe_sshfs.png
 
In this case I did not use the 'user@' before remote.server because I have direct access to the remote sshd.
This has nothing to do with having direct access or not. If you don't supply a username it simply uses your current username, so if your username is user1 it will automatically use user1@remote.server. You really only need to supply a username if the username on the remote system is different from your current username. For example if user1 needs to login as user2 on the remote system.
 
I use x11-fm/xfe on all 8 of my laptops. So much that I have it open at boot and keep it tucked up and scrolled in the right hand corner of my desktop for easy access.

The blue and white title bar icon spoils the look of my desktop config so I open /usr/local/share/xfe/icons/gnomeblue-theme/xfe.png in graphics/gimp, color it black and replace it.
 
But unable to open root window (" an error has occurred").

I just finished using it as root to move something onto a USB stick, and you have to mount it first as root.

When I need to run something as root, I log in a terminal as root and run it from there. When I was done I terminated the program, unmounted the stick and logged out. Though from what I understand that is not considered good practice, it's how I've always done it and am accustomed to working in that environment.

I've never installed or used security/sudo or security/doas.
 
Back
Top