Beta 2 of Polo File Manager is now available.
Beta builds are currently available only to a limited set of users who have donated to this project. The final stable release of Polo will be available to all users (April or May). People who donate will get access to a few extra features in the final release.
If you are interested in testing the beta release of Polo, please send me an email and I will add you to the beta mailing list.
Next beta will be available next weekend (March 18).
Feature status
Completed: Sessions, Media View, List View, Icon View, Tile View, Toolbar, Statusbar, Layouts, Tabs, File Context Menu, File Menubar, File Operations, Overwrite Confirmation, Settings, Keyboard shortcuts
Pending: Sidebar, Trash, Cloud storage support, Archive support, Remote and virtual filesystems, Checksum calculations, Drag & drop.
What's New
Sessions
Polo will remember the last session and reload the state on the next run. Open tabs, open directories, pane layouts and view modes will be restored. You can keep tabs open for directories that you normally work with, and Polo will restore them the next time you start the application.
Media View
A new view mode has been added for browsing photos and videos. If a folder is detected as containing photos and videos, Polo will switch to a 256x256 size icon-view. This view displays large-sized thumbnails that makes it easier to browse through items in the folder. Missing thumbnails will be generated automatically. You can exclude certain directories if you do not wish to switch to this view automatically.
Existing thumbails will be displayed from the system cache, and missing thumbnails will be generated for photos and videos. Since thumbnails generated by Polo are larger than ones created by other file managers, you can clear existing thumbnails in your system cache to force Polo to generate fresh images:
rm -rfv ~/.cache/thumbnails/{normal,large,fail}
rm -rfv ~/.thumbnails/{normal,large,fail}
mkdir -pv ~/.cache/thumbnails/{normal,large,fail}
mkdir -pv ~/.thumbnails/{normal,large,fail}
Speed Improvements
Application startup and new tab creation is now 8x faster than previous beta. Various optimizations have been done to speed up application startup, and initialization of tabs and views.
Distro Support
Issues have been fixed for Ubuntu 16.10 and 17.04 and tested on following - Ubuntu 16.04, Xubuntu 16.10, Xubuntu 17.01, Kubuntu 16.04, Manjaro 17 Xfce
Tab Rename
Tabs can now be renamed by right-clicking on the tab label and selecting "Edit Name" from the popup menu.
Icon Drawing Options
You can now select if emblems and thumbnails should be drawn/loaded for list view, icon view and tiled view.
Emblems and thumbnails affect the speed with which folder contents are loaded, so turning them off can speed up loading of directories which contain a large number of items (1000+). You will not notice any speed difference with smaller directories.
Emblems indicate if an item is a symlink or read-only but can also make the icon look congested, so you can now turn it off if you prefer a clean look for your icons.
Emblems and thumbnails are turned off by default for list view since the icons displayed in list are already very small (16px). You can turn it on if you wish to.
Donate
If you find my applications useful and wish to say thanks, you can buy me a coffee by making a donation with Paypal. You could also sign up as a sponsor on Patreon.com. People who donate get access to beta releases of applications during the development stage, and extra features in the final release.
