2 pane, swiss army knife file manager?

[Colin Law]

On 21 November 2012 13:38, Florian Diesch <diesch at spamfence.net> wrote:
> Am Wed, 21 Nov 2012 08:53:37 +0000
> schrieb Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com>:
>
>> > No more. In Nautilus 3.6.2, they dropped it tosimplify stuff.
>> > And actually - I agree with that. It's so easy to open two windows
>> > side by side…
>>
>> Can you describe exactly how to do that please?  It seems to take me a
>> lot of clicks, so perhaps I am missing something.
>
> Run
> ================================SNIP============================================
> #!/bin/sh
>
> set -- $(xwininfo -root| awk -F '[ :]+' '/ (Width|Height):/ { print
> $3 }') width=$1
> height=$2
>
> win1="$(xwininfo| awk '/^xwininfo: W/ { print $4 }')"
> win2="$(xwininfo| awk '/^xwininfo: W/ { print $4 }')"
>
> wmctrl -i -r "$win1" -e 0,0,0,$((width/2)),$height
> wmctrl -i -r "$win2" -e 0,$((width/2)),0,$((width/2)),$height
> ================================SNIP============================================
>
> and klick the two windows

That's very useful, thanks, I have learnt quite a lot getting it
going.  I think the formatting lost a bit, there should be a new line
before width=$1 I think (and not the spurious folding line after
print).  It does not quite do what I want as it spreads them across my
two displays and because the two monitors are different heights I end
up with one of the windows half off the screen, but I can see where to
go to get what I want.  Also for anyone else seeing this I had to
install the wmctrl package.

However, starting from a single nautilus window open, to split the
window and move the right hand split to a new bookmark takes 1
keypress and two mouse clicks.  Using the script takes 4 clicks, a
drag (to separate the two windows) and 4 (or more) keypresses, plus a
lot more brain power (though that would get better with practice).
Still not really comparable.

The main point is that software should become more usable as it
develops, not less, as is the case with nautilus, for me anyway.

Colin