FileNo 0.8.37 beta

FileNo 0.8.37 beta — the repository git will not read now says why.

Opening the Git panel on a project that lives behind \\wsl.localhost, or on a
network share, showed four lines of git's own fatal error and an empty panel:
detected dubious ownership in repository at …, with the remedy buried in the
middle of it.

The refusal is real and worth respecting. Git will not read a repository whose
files belong to another user account, because a repository carries
configuration that can run programs — and from Windows, everything reached
through \\wsl.localhost or a share looks exactly like that, even when it is
your own work.

So that one refusal now has a page of its own. It says whose rule it is and
why, puts the exact exception git asked for in a field you can copy, and offers
to add it for you — behind a dialog that says plainly what that means: one line
in your global git configuration, honoured from then on by every git
program on the machine, and the ownership check no longer protecting that path.
Nothing is added quietly; switching off somebody's safety check on their behalf
is not a convenience.

Everything else about the Git panel is as it was in 0.8.36: the branch and the
count of changed files on the status bar, the history with its branch graph
under the panes, the files of each commit and their patches. It still only
reads — no checkout, no commit, no reset, no pull.

---

This release carries the Windows build only. The Linux packages of 0.8.35
remain the current ones there, and FileNo on Linux will go on offering that
release until the next Linux build is published.

FileNo 0.8.36 beta

FileNo 0.8.36 beta — the folder that is a repository now says so, and can be read.

Git, where there is one. A folder under version control was, until now, just
a folder. The status bar shows the branch it is on and how many files differ
from it, and clicking that opens the history under both panes: the branches and
tags on the left, the commits with their branch graph in the middle, the files
of the selected commit on the right, and under them its message — or the
coloured patch of whichever file you click. A double click on a file shows it in
the pane.

It only reads. There is no checkout here, no commit, no reset, no pull. That
is deliberate: a button that rewrites your working tree has no business standing
next to the one that deletes files.

And it stays out of the way. For a folder you are simply standing in, the
whole cost is a look up the parent folders for a .git and a read of one small
file — no program is started to learn a branch name. The history then arrives
200 commits at a time and fetches more as you scroll; a commit's files are read
when you select it, a patch only when you click the file, and all of it on
threads of its own, so a slow repository can never be the reason a folder took a
second to open.

Ways in: the branch button on the status bar, Ctrl+Shift+G, Tools → Git
history…, or the command Git. Preferences → Git holds the page size, the
graph, the size at which a patch is cut short, and which git to run. Worktrees
and submodules, a detached HEAD, merges and the very first commit of a
repository all answer properly.

---

This release carries the Windows build only. The Linux packages of 0.8.35
remain the current ones there, and FileNo on Linux will go on offering that
release until the next Linux build is published.

FileNo 0.8.35 beta

FileNo 0.8.35 beta — a crash while dragging tabs, and reports that keep your paths to themselves.

Tabs. Closing a tab while the mouse button was still down could take the
program with it. The tab bar remembers which pane you grabbed, so that a drag
still finds it after the order shifts — but nothing told it when that pane went
away (Ctrl+W, the context menu, a panel closing), and the next movement of the
mouse reached for something Qt had already deleted. Reported from 0.8.34 by
somebody simply rearranging their tabs.

Reports no longer carry your directory layout. A crash report always
included the error trace, and a trace names files — which meant the report told
us your user name and where you keep things. The trace still goes out, because
that is the whole value of it, but your home directory is replaced with
<home> before anything leaves the machine. Installed locations such as
/usr/lib/fileno stay: they say nothing about you.

And it stops reporting from a source checkout. Running FileNo from a git
clone no longer offers to send anything — a crash in a working tree is somebody's
half-written script far more often than a bug in the program. The report is still
written to disk; FILENO_REPORT=1 sends it anyway, and FILENO_NO_REPORT=1
switches sending off everywhere.

FileNo 0.8.34 beta

FileNo 0.8.34 beta — the viewer, taken seriously.

Sharp on HiDPI. The viewer and the preview panel used to scale images to
logical pixels, which on scaled displays (125 %, 150 %, 200 %…) meant a second
resample on the way to the screen — every photo arrived slightly soft. Both
now render straight to the screen's physical pixels. If FileNo ever looked
blurrier than your image viewer, this is the release that fixes it.

Every image format. The package now bundles Qt's extended image plugins:
JXL, AVIF, HEIC/HEIF, EXR, PSD, XCF, KRA, ORA, QOI, PCX and the camera RAW
family (CR2/CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG and friends). Anything a given system still
cannot decode is converted through ImageMagick or ffmpeg when one of them is
installed, and phone photos respect their EXIF rotation in the preview panel.

Audio files play. mp3, flac, ogg, wav, m4a and the rest open on a simple
player page — title and artist from the tags, a seek bar, play/pause (Space),
stop and volume. Playback starts on open and runs through ffplay (install
ffmpeg if you do not have it); Next/Previous walk a folder's audio together
with its images.

FileNo 0.8.33 beta

FileNo 0.8.33 beta — touchpad navigation.

A two-finger swipe walks the history. Swipe left on the file list to go
Back, right to go Forward — as in a browser, in both the details and the icon
view. The list's own content comes first: while it can still scroll
horizontally, the swipe scrolls it, and only at the edge does it navigate. The
direction respects the system's natural-scrolling setting, so “fingers left =
back” holds either way. One swipe navigates one step, however long it is.
Preferences → Operations → “Touchpad: a two-finger swipe goes Back / Forward”
turns it off.

The icon view also picks up the mouse side buttons (X1/X2) for Back/Forward,
which the details view already had.

FileNo 0.8.32 beta

FileNo 0.8.32 beta — a small quality release.

Yesterday's files say “Yesterday”. Following 0.8.31's Today HH:MM, the
Modified, Born and Seen columns now show Yesterday HH:MM for anything from
the previous calendar day. The comparison is by calendar date, so midnight and
daylight-saving changes do not shift which files carry the label. Older
timestamps keep the date format configured in Preferences → Display.

FileNo 0.8.31 beta

FileNo 0.8.31 beta — a small quality release.

A file touched today says “Today”. The Modified column now shows
Today HH:MM for anything from the current day instead of repeating the
calendar date — the Explorer/Opus convention, previously only active on
Windows builds. The Born and Seen columns follow the same rule, and older
timestamps keep the date format configured in Preferences → Display.

FileNo 0.8.30 beta

FileNo 0.8.30 beta — a bugfix release.

Slow-click rename no longer blocks drag & drop. The second click on a
selected item used to open the name editor already on the mouse press, so
grabbing a selected file to drag it was impossible — the editor appeared under
the cursor instead. The rename now behaves as in Windows Explorer: the press
only arms it, and the decision falls when the button comes back up. Move the
mouse past the drag threshold and it is a drag, no editor; click again quickly
and it is a double click, so the file opens; release quietly in place and the
rename starts after a short pause. Both the details and the icon view follow
the same rule, and the option can still be turned off in Preferences
(“Rename with a slow second click”).

FileNo 0.8.29 beta

FileNo 0.8.29 is a beta — the program is in use every day, but expect rough edges.

This release is five things that had each been put off at least once for looking
like a day's work next to something more visible.

Sorting is faster. A column's values are turned into one comparable key per
row before the sort instead of being compared pair by pair. At 20 000 files:
sorting by Name 562 → 378 ms, by Size 618 → 440 ms. The old comparison stays as
the definition of the order and the suite proves the new one agrees with it
across every column, both directions and every combination of the sorting
preferences — a faster sort must not quietly become a different sort.

The viewer shows text. A README, a log, a .py or a .csv now gets a page
of its own instead of an empty canvas saying "No preview". It matters most with
"list all files" turned on — the setting whose whole purpose is to walk the
folder rather than only its photos. A double click in the manager still opens a
.txt in your own editor.

Packing to ZIP runs in the background. It is an ordinary job now: it queues
behind the other file work, reports file by file, obeys Pause and can be
cancelled — where before the window simply froze until the last file was in. A
cancelled pack removes its half-written archive, and Undo appears when the
archive actually exists.

Eject. A stick, a card or an external disk offers Eject in the sidebar's
Computer branch, in the drive list Computer opens, and as the Eject command
(bare, it takes the volume the pane is standing on). Any pane inside the volume
is walked home first, and the desktop's own tools are tried in order —
udisksctl unmount with power-off after it, then gio mount -e, then
umount. When something holds the volume, the tool's own words come back, so
"target is busy" says so.

fileno --command. The command language, driven from outside the program:

fileno --command "Select *.log"
fileno --command 'Go /var/log'

It is handed to the copy that is already running, over the same private socket
a second launch already uses for folders — so a desktop key binding, a shell
script or another program can drive the window. Everything after --command is
the command, unsplit, and a command-only request does not raise the window: a
script speaking to the manager is not a click.

Install: fileno_0.8.29_amd64.deb, or the tarball for a distribution without
dpkg. The Gentoo overlay is updated with this release.

FileNo 0.8.28 beta

This release carries work that was finished days ago and had nowhere to go:
0.8.27 was built from a branch that did not yet have it. Nothing here is new
breakage being fixed — it is four finished things reaching a package for the
first time, plus the catalogue entry the packages were missing.

A right-click menu that fits on one screen. The factory layout folds our
second rank into "More actions" and the system's own entries one level down,
the way Windows 11 does with "Show more options" — and Preferences now carries
the door to the menu editor, which until now was only reachable from the
Settings menu. The layout stays yours to rearrange.

A drive wears its own icon, and stops lending it to every folder. Icons are
cached by TYPE, and every row in Computer is a directory as far as the model is
concerned — so the first drive drawn became the icon of <dir> and, from that
moment, every folder in the program wore a picture of a hard disk. Volumes are
answered per path now: each drive gets the picture the system draws for it, and
folders keep theirs.

The package introduces itself. GNOME Software and KDE Discover read
AppStream metainfo; without it the package was a bare name with no description,
no screenshots and often no icon. The .deb and the Gentoo tarball now carry
dev.fileno.FileNo.metainfo.xml, with the version and date filled in from the
build, and the build refuses to produce a package whose entry appstreamcli
rejects.

Windows gains device watching (a stick, a card, and phones and cameras
speaking MTP, which have no drive letter for a volume list to find), its own
"Open with" read from the register Explorer reads, and the file owner column.
Those parts do nothing on Linux; they are in the same source tree.