Puppy Linux: ROX File Manager Basics

2021-09-12

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of practical guides for using Puppy Linux. I’d also like to contribute these to the wiki later but I don’t want to learn how to do that right now. Anyway, this is a short post explaining some things about the ROX File Manager, the default file manager in Puppy. Everything here is also in the full documentation, but digging into that can be daunting when you’re starting out.

So, clicking on something opens it instead of selecting it.

Yup! In most file managers, you single-click to select a file and double-click to open it. In ROX, you single-click to open a file, and double-clicking just isn’t a thing you do (with a couple exceptions, search for “double-click” in the manual to learn more). Personally I like this better because double-clicking is hard for me, but this confused me a lot when I first installed Puppy.

How do I select a file in ROX?

There’s a few ways. Note that I use click as shorthand for left-click in this guide.

• Click-drag draws a selection box, like many file managers.
• Control-click a file to select it instead of opening it.
  • Hold control and click additional files to select multiple files.
• Press the arrow keys to bring up a keyboard-driven cursor. Move the cursor over a file and press spacebar to toggle whether it is selected.
• Right-click and go to the Select menu to select by name or other search criteria.
  • You can also skip the menu and bring up select-by-name by pressing ., and the conditional selection box by pressing ?.

By the way, you can also press Ctrl-<number> to save a selection, or just save the current directory if no files are selected. Pressing <number> will bring you back to that directory and restore the selection. It’s kinda like control-groups in RTS games like Starcraft or Age of Empires, but for your file manager. I never use this, but it’s neat!

Some other neat things

• Shift-click has special actions for various file types.
  • Shift-click a file to open it as a text file instead of whatever the default open action is.
  • Shift-click a symlink to go wherever the symlink goes instead of opening it.
  • Shift-click a mounted directory to unmount it.
• Press / to open up the path-entry box. You can type in a file path to go directly to it.
• Press ! to open up the shell command box. Type a command and hit enter, and ROX will run the command in that directory. Click on a file while this is open to insert the name of the file into the command box.

More information

There’s a lot more to ROX than I covered here, I just wanted to explain the things I found confusing when I first started using it. To get to the full documentation, click the Help Button and open Manual.html in the folder it takes you to.

Good luck!