SpaceFM file manager now in EasyOS

This has been a drama. Looking for a very small two-pane (or more panes) simple file manager, for those guys who are not entirely at home using ROX-Filer. Actually, it is just mental conditioning; having multiple ROX windows is just as effective, perhaps more so.

Anyway, looked around. "Small" is a difficult ask. Then there is the problem of integration into EasyOS. We have partition icons on the screen, and if a file manager has capability of mounting and unmounting partitions, then it must sync with those desktop icons. Easy has EasyShare for all kinds of network connectivity, but many file managers have their own inbuilt network connectivity; perhaps good as an alternative means of doing stuff over a network, such as file transfer with Samba.

Have done this before, but yesterday did it again; looked at the file manager offerings. What it came down to, is there is only one that ticks the boxes; SpaceFM. SpaceFM does all interfacing with bash scripts, which is great. Bash we know. I played with the scripts, and it was quite easy to mount a partition within SpaceFM and the desktop icon would also change to show the "close box", meaning it is mounted. And reverse, unmounting.

Also, SpaceFM has plugins, most importantly some that are for network connectivity.

Now for the problems...

I started by using SpaceFM from the Debian repository. It is version 1.0.6 with some patches applied to fix a few things and get it to compile with recent glibc and gcc. Because, that's the problem; 1.0.6 was released 7 years ago. The project is dead.

Yeah, I found plugins, but all dated 2012 or 2013. Hmmm.

What I found is it is unstable. Crashed several times. Also, the "refresh" button doesn't work. I read a comment somewhere that there is a problem with gtk3, and SpaceFM does have the choice of compiling with gtk2, so I did that. No joy though.

Was playing with this until about 7am this morning, and went to bed when the sun was rising. Not a good habit to get into.

Anyway, here is the project page, the now-dead project page:

https://ignorantguru.github.io/spacefm/

I discovered a fork on github, that is still active:

https://github.com/thermitegod/spacefm

...very active; however, it has grown into something very different, accumulated huge dependencies.

Then found another fork on github, that has a little bit of development after version 1.0.6. Noticed that Puppy Forum member dimkr has contributed commits. Compile failures, so I applied all the Debian patches; only one of them partly-failed. Compiled, and pleasant surprise, no more crashing. Also, the "refresh" button works. Here is the project page:

https://github.com/gameblabla/spacefm

And here is a photo:

Mime-handling works nicely also; right-click and shows appropriate apps to run the file, just like in ROX.

Mounting and unmounting of partition now looks good, but there is more to do. For example, Easy has 'filemnt' that can be used to mount and unmount an .iso file, which can replace the method that SpaceFM wants to use.

The plugins are in /usr/share/spacefm/plugins. Two of them are for network connectivity, and one of those uses a script named /mnttools', that I have put into /usr/bin. Not tested, that can be a future project for anyone who is interested.

Puppy Forum discussion on SpaceFM is here:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=152255#p152255

Finding the plugins was not so simple. There is this page:

https://github.com/IgnorantGuru/spacefm/wiki/plugins/

...some links are broken. I found some of them here:

...errr, now I can't find it. It is a google project site, back in the day when Google was hosting projects. Still there, but read-only. The plugins are listed on the Old Puppy Forum, but no link:

https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=89334

...you might think that doing a google search on one of those filenames would locate it, especially that google have it archived somewhere, but no. I will have to append the link to this blog post later. Also, will upload the SpaceFM PET and patched source tarball soon. It will be builtin to the next release of EasyOS.

EDIT 2025-07-26:
Found the google.com site hosting the SpaceFM plugins:

https://code.google.com/archive/p/bashscripts/downloads?page=1   

Tags: easy