Rodent Delta

Rodent is fast, small and powerful file manager for the GNU operating system (but it also works in BSD). That\'s one way to look at it. Another way is to call it a graphic shell (that\'s probably more accurate).

Rodent Delta has extensive work done. Thread units have expanded and support for local/remote files is now in place. Rodent Delta will run much faster on multicore boxes (and a bit slower on single cores), but is still faster than the official gnome filemanager on loading large directories like "/usr/bin".

You will find binaries in both amd64 and x86 format for Debian 6, Fedora 17, OpenSuse 12.1 and Ubuntu LTS 12.04. Builds have also been tested on ArchLinux, Gentoo and FreeBSD.

Rodent Delta now sports the new "FUSE" plugin, which allows you to mount remote ssh filesystems (you just need a ssh account on the remote machine) and nfs remote mounts (nfs is not exactly fuse, unless you consider that "root" also falls under the "u").

This is a different approach than that taken by Gnome. There is no GVFS. GVFS will do a fuse mount in ~/.gvfs, and hide this from the user. Rodent users, on the other hand, are not stupid: hiding vital information about how the system works is just counter productive and reminds me of MSWindows.

If you compile from source, you may choose to enable the "experimental" plugins.
They are experimental because they have not been fully tested on all platforms (but work fine on my Gentoo box). These experimental plugins include:

- obexfs: to access files on your mobile phone or device via bluetooth.
- curlftpfs: to access file on remote ftp servers.
- ecryptfs: to create and access encrypted directories on local disk or removable media
- cifs: to mount MSWindows shares. Smbfs is long deprecated and should not be used anymore.
- samba: this allows you to navigate MSWindows networks and select cifs mount points. This replaces xfsamba and samba plugins from relevant xfce 3.x and 4.x releases.
- edit button in fgr (find) dialog.

These "experimental" items will be deemed stable in upcoming releases.
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My favorite: ecryptfs

The approach of encrypting the whole user's directory that some distributions use is weak and gives a false sense of security. The Rodent approach is to encrypt that which requires to be encrypted and only decrypt when necessary, not every time you happen to login. This is specially useful for removable devices. If you are working on a multimillion dollar confidential project and your usb drive gets stolen, you might be in a sore spot if that small directory with vital information was not properly encrypted. This plugin replaces the scramble program distributed relevant xfce 4.x releases and closes the security issue noted by FreeBSD users (better late than never).

If you feel that some feature or functionality would be nice, submit a feature request. If you find a bug, submit a bug report (tracebacks are essential). If you do not know what a feature request or bug report is, then Rodent is probably not for you.

Finally, if you wish to enable core dumps, configure with the --with-core option.

Remember that Rodent is provided as is, with no particular Warranty, as stated in the GPLv3 license. My only wish is that this software may be as helpful to you as it is to me.


Enjoy.