What's the future of this project?

[ProgrammingLife]

Is this project abandoned?
SpaceFM is the greatest file manager I've ever seen. Don't want to see it abandoned.

[mati75]

I think project is dead.

[TuxerIT]

Project has been dead for 4 years. Yes very sad, because there aren't any other light weight alternatives that have several multi panes, as a QT/GTK app. There some multi pane FM out there, just to old school looking/style.

The only thing, which SpaceFM was based off of, is PCManFM, which is still in development, but slightly more bloated.

We do seriously need someone to pick this project up, but that's the world of Linux, projects coming and going.

QTFM is the lightest thing out there, no multi panes, but there's been no development in almost a year, and I started using QTFM when it started and back then, the DEV was quite active on his GitHub repo, now I hardly ever see him, not sure what's going on with it.

https://qtfm.eu/

[zen0bit]

What about this fork?
https://github.com/thermitegod/spacefm
looks like active...

[TuxerIT]

Hasn't been a release in over a year, even though there is activity, and the DEV doesn't have an Issues section for others to report on, questions, etc...

Anyone know how to get a hold of this person and ask him/her to put up an Issues section?

[cheapy]

There is a fork called zzzfm. Its included in antiX 21 base and full. It's lighter and includes some fixes as well.

https://gitlab.com/skidoo/zzzfm

[dimkr]

I'm considering SpaceFM as a file manager for the Wayland port of Puppy Linux, hence #801 and puppylinux-woof-CE/woof-CE#3309.

Maybe I'll start a fork, with a narrowed-down scope of small fixes (usability improvements, bug fixes, translations) and maintenance work (like CI), without GTK+ 2 support and without X-specific features like --desktop.

[TuxerIT]

There is a fork called zzzfm. Its included in antiX 21 base and full. It's lighter and includes some fixes as well.

https://gitlab.com/skidoo/zzzfm

I wasted my time checking it out, then I waste more of my time making several issue reports on this person's repo, and then they delete every one of them, no replies, comments nothing, just deleted.

Seriously, I'd stay away from zzzfm if this is how people are going to act. This isn't 1995 with all the punks on IRC yelling RTFM and treating people like crap, like they use to, it's 2022 and people seriously need to respect others, that come along, for the good of a project like I did, and try and help with reporting issues.

Screw zzzfm, I'll stick to SpaceFM.

P.S. I made this reply even though it's not really On Topic, so others would see, because I'm not making this up. The filemanager is also in a broken state, SpaceFM is still a lot better to use.

[69mustang-mach1]

issue reports on this person's repo, and then they delete every one of them

Quite a fantastic story. Cousin Brad ("skidoo") is deceased. Had been offline most of 2021 due to failing health. I had checked, and nobody in family had login info for most of his accounts. So unless someone outside the family had co-author permission for his code repositories, seems impossible that any issue reports were read and deleted.

Let's all hope the thermitegod spacefm fork stays viable.

[cheapy]

Sorry to hear about skidoo. He helped me so many times. I hope someone will pick up zzzfm, as its what I use day to day.

Good luck with your project, TuxerIT. Maybe you can pick up one of these balls and run with it, yourself.

[TuxerIT]

Must be a bug on the Gitlab, I went back and looked at the site for up to two weeks, and all of the issues were gone, now they have magically reappeared, this is quite odd.

Sorry to hear skidoo is deceased...

Guess we're sticking to SpaceFM for some time to come. hmm

[maximstewart]

I love SpaceFM a lot and it not getting maintained prompted me to write something of a clone to it but with Python and Gtk. Wont kid tho, mine is a pale imitation by comparison. =P Though, to be fare, I didn't/don't need everything that SpaceFM allowed for.

This is a shameless plug:
https://github.com/maximstewart/SolarFM

NOTE: Check dev branch for the work, updates, horror that is my project.

Edit: I'm actually trying to refactor and move away from the heavy mixins usage that I started out with. I wrote a lot of it just trying to get my main needs met quickly. (Plus not knowing Python all that well at the time. To be fare, I'm still traaassshhh.)

[sedimentation-fault]

Just to let you know: I edited this project's Wikipedia page to reflect the fact that it is unmaintained software.
Sorry, but 200+ open bugs, no answers from the maintainer, no new releases for the past 4 years - all this is enough "proof" that this project is indeed unmaintained. Let's face it, no reason to wait for "Gödelian" proofs (e.g. self-referencing sentences a-la "this project is unmaintained").

[satmandu]

Sorry to hear about skidoo. He helped me so many times. I hope someone will pick up zzzfm, as its what I use day to day.

Good luck with your project, TuxerIT. Maybe you can pick up one of these balls and run with it, yourself.

@TuxerIT Please post if you fork this project and update it... It would be nice to have a new upstream for this project...

[BwackNinja]

As someone who was at one point heavily involved in this project, (I ported it to GTK3 among other things) I'd say that it is definitely dead here and no one else has access to this repo, so it isn't worth opening new issues beyond people discussing among themselves because there isn't a better place to do it.

As for what people should use instead, I'd recommend the last release of https://github.com/thermitegod/spacefm because it at least fixed some issues like hyphenation in word-wrapped filenames. After that release it dropped GTK2 support (which is EOL anyway so no one should consider that controversial), has ported the whole project to C++ from C, gutted a large amount of old cruft, and is working on GTK4 support as well. For a new release to occur, all of that has to be stabilized -- which certainly hasn't happened yet given the rate of changes in the codebase. Until then, I imagine that issues would be little more than a nuisance for the developer. Pull requests are open, so people are still able to contribute code to the project.

If someone really wants to fork and maintain SpaceFM separately, I'd recommend starting from thermitegod's last release thermitegod@4f7240b or later at thermitegod@00d012f which is right before porting to C++. You should also incorporate 29219e1 which fixes crashes with drag-and-drop that came about because of inheriting the wrong way of changing drag-and-drop behavior from PCManFM which involved embedding an internal GTK data structure (always the wrong thing to do) into the codebase that changed in later releases of GTK. That issue still exists in thermitegod's current version, so I'll also create a pull request for that sometime.

[yurivict]

https://github.com/thermitegod/spacefm is active.

But unfortunately this fork downloads a lot of files during build, which isn't allowed in any sane package builder. This is also very insecure.
Unfortunately the author chose to download dependencies instead of using packages which is a standard practice.

There are other issues there too, so this fork isn't usable in its current form.

[0CCULTIST]

As someone who was at one point heavily involved in this project, (I ported it to GTK3 among other things) I'd say that it is definitely dead here and no one else has access to this repo, so it isn't worth opening new issues beyond people discussing among themselves because there isn't a better place to do it.

As for what people should use instead, I'd recommend the last release of https://github.com/thermitegod/spacefm because it at least fixed some issues like hyphenation in word-wrapped filenames. After that release it dropped GTK2 support (which is EOL anyway so no one should consider that controversial), has ported the whole project to C++ from C, gutted a large amount of old cruft, and is working on GTK4 support as well. For a new release to occur, all of that has to be stabilized -- which certainly hasn't happened yet given the rate of changes in the codebase. Until then, I imagine that issues would be little more than a nuisance for the developer. Pull requests are open, so people are still able to contribute code to the project.

If someone really wants to fork and maintain SpaceFM separately, I'd recommend starting from thermitegod's last release thermitegod@4f7240b or later at thermitegod@00d012f which is right before porting to C++. You should also incorporate 29219e1 which fixes crashes with drag-and-drop that came about because of inheriting the wrong way of changing drag-and-drop behavior from PCManFM which involved embedding an internal GTK data structure (always the wrong thing to do) into the codebase that changed in later releases of GTK. That issue still exists in thermitegod's current version, so I'll also create a pull request for that sometime.

I'd just like to say I appreciate yours, and everyone who has worked on this project's work on it as it was truly a labor of love. Small, fast & functional, I believe SpaceFM was the pinnacle of UI file managers for Linux & had a lot of potential. I'm hopeful the forks only continue to improve upon it :)

[fabertawe]

I agree wholeheartedly with 0CCULTIST. So just another "me too" to say I use SpaceFM daily and I really couldn't manage without it! If anyone were to pick it up just for bug fixing and maintenance then I would make a small financial donation. I dread the day I can no longer use it.