CyFiler

File manager

CyFiler is the file manager, and it is the clean-room counterpart of IRIX fm. cyfm is another name for the same binary. A directory opens in Icons view. List and Columns are the other two views, and the next window opens in whichever view you used last. The thumbwheel zooms the icons. Pictures get thumbnails. The finder, the drop pockets, the scrollbar, and the columns are libcyui widgets. The icons are drawn by libcyicon. The View menu has two icon faces. Fast & Simple is the small drawn icon. Slick & Svelte is the richer 24-bit picture, and it is the face that ships. The speed numbers further down were taken in both faces.

The shelf and the content viewer are the panes that fm kept under Preserve Layout. Both start off, and whichever way you set them, they stay that way. The shelf holds programs and folders you use often. You add one from the Actions menu, or you drop it on the well. A click opens it. The right button takes it off the shelf. Drop a file onto a program parked there and that program launches on the file. The content viewer, along the bottom, shows a text file, a picture, or a short note about a directory.

The session also runs CyFiler as the backdrop. That process owns the root wallpaper and the desktop icons: Home, the dumpster, and whatever you leave on the desktop. A directory window is the same program, pointed at a path. The pictures here are one session. First is Icons view on a home directory, which is the view that ships. Then As Columns and As List, both on /usr/local/bin. Then the icon catalog.

The icon catalog is the SGI Icon Catalog, done as a mode of this file manager. On IRIX that book is its own program, /usr/sbin/iconcatalog. The pages are directories of symlinks under /usr/lib/desktop/iconcatalog/pages. A directory name is a category, and each symlink is a program that machine has installed: Applications, ControlPanels, MediaTools, DesktopTools, Demos, WebTools, and the rest of the set. Counted on one IRIX 6.5.30 machine, those pages held 203 entries. The faces live beside that book. /usr/lib/images holds .icon files in SGI imagelib, which is an RGB picture. /usr/lib/filetype holds the FTI icon libraries: one set for the system, one for the install tools, one for devices, and one for the local additions.

In CyFiler you open the catalog from the View menu, or with cyfiler --catalog, and it takes over the same window. The notebook along the bottom is the set of pages. Applications, Controls, and Tools are the session menu, which is the same list the toolchest posts. The other tabs are whatever this machine has installed. On IRIX the miner walks those Icon Catalog page directories and keeps the SGI page name as the tab. On any other system it reads the packages the operating system has already installed and groups them the same way. The list it writes is ~/.cyanotype/share/cyapps/inventory.tsv, and that same list fills the toolchest and the root menu. A program shows up in one place because it was found in one place. The right button can leave a copy of an icon on the desktop. libcyicon draws the face from the SGI .icon or the FTI when the machine has them, and from the picture the package shipped when it does not.

The speed is measured against earlier builds of this same program, on the machines it is meant for, and the slow paths were taken out until they stopped being the story. On the O2, a cold home window started at about 26 seconds. The first rounds of work brought that to about one second. A quiet startup on that machine now beats 223 milliseconds, and the other two runs that day were 228 and 246. What came out of the path was the Home-icon decode, a second decorate pass, and a directory open that decoded every large icon before the first paint. A 600-item directory that spent about 16 seconds in that load now takes about 0.3 seconds, and a second visit to the same directory takes about 168 milliseconds. On the Linux twin, the 21 October baseline, before those last cuts, was already about one second (Slick about 1027 ms, Fast about 965 ms).

Icons view, which is the default, on a home directory. One window is open. The backdrop still owns the wallpaper and the desktop icons.

As Columns, on /usr/local/bin. This is the same program, in the second of the three views.

As List, on that same directory.

The icon catalog, opened on the Applications page. It is a mode of the same window, and the notebook along the bottom is the set of pages.

All applications