Difference between revisions of "Worker - An Introduction"

  Please note: Worker is currently not available in the

Manjaro repo, so you need to install it with "Yaourt"

(or similar) from the Arch User Repository (AUR)[https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/worker/].

Unfortunately the documentation on Ralf Hoffmann's site (he is the creator of Worker, amongst other app's), is incomplete & parts at least are somewhat out of date. You basically work much of how Worker is configured out for yourself without having your hand held. That said, the GUI Worker Configuration Manager is pretty self explanatory.

The Worker Configuration screen shown above, will give you an inkling of the types of configuration options that are available inside of it.

 

==What can this Filemanager called Worker do?==

The above barely scratches the surface of what Worker can be configured to do. It is very quick, & has barely any other dependencies than X.org.

As informative as the screenshots shown at the above link are, they don't show you what can be done colour wise with Worker. Using various colours to suit your eyes/taste & to make Worker more easily used & more practical, as you can use certain colours to good effect (especially where there is danger, as in the case of commands such as DELETE , Reboot , Shutdown & any buttons that you have set up to use Sudo or root privileges one way or another. The first screenshot on this page is a reasonably good example of the use of colours in this way.

When you set Worker up, you can select the font & font size that you would like to use. Choosing fonts is as far as I'm concerned the most pre-historic part of Worker, though as of this edit, the choice of font/&/size is now much better than it was. Fortunately if you do need/want to do it, after you have done it once, there isn't much to do when it comes to resizing fonts thereafter. See this page of the Worker documentation for more on the subject of choosing sizing Worker's fonts: [http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/documentation/features/fonts.html]

==Paths & Bookmarked locations==

==Custom Button Configuration==

You also can set up the Worker command button bank(s) to suit you. Choose how many rows of them & how many banks (each bank will have the same number of buttons) as well. I use two banks of buttons, the second bank behind the main bank of 42 buttons, carries buttons for working with many different types of file compression, plus some for audio ripping to various specific formats. You cycle to the next main button bank by hitting the bottom bar in the Worker window - it holds the date/time, free RAM, swap usage - though this is somewhat configurable too.

I use a number of buttons that came as part of my initial Worker install, though most of the buttons in my config have been made by me to suit my needs. When you see a button in a screenshot that has a "dog eared" top right corner, that means that if you use your RMB on it, you will have access to another button option that is hiding underneath. (You could for example have the top button saying '''Edit''' for editing existing files, & the button accessed via the RMB, underneath, saying '''Edit New''' for creating new files.)

Even though Worker comes with inbuilt text & image viewing abilities, I prefer to set Worker up to use more powerful external programs. So for viewing images, I use Geegie. By associating Geegie with the various types of image file types available (using the Worker Configuration GUI), when I double click on an image file in the Worker display, Geegie displays it for me (you could set different image types to be opened by different image viewing or editing programs if you had the need).

I can then view all of the images in that directory by scrolling my mouse wheel, or tell Geegie to go full screen & play a slide show of the images, or do whatever else Geegie will allow me to do with any of the images in that directory.

If I '''R'''MB click on the '''F3 - Show Pics''' button (yes you can easily set up function keys too), I will see, '''Edit Pics''' (the RMB buttons are all in different colours than the top LMB accessed buttons). If I have an image file highlighted in Worker, then Pinta (my choice, you can use whatever image editor you wanted to) will open up with the highlighted file ready for me to edit.

For example, I use Evince for .pdf files, Firefox for .html files, Leafpad for .txt & unknown files, I have sudo Leafpad buttons for both creating '''New''' files & of course to work on existing files. So I can select a config file in say the /etc & then use the Worker '''sudo Leafpad''' button on it, which will cause Worker to throw up a terminal window where I have to input my sudo password, then the config file from /etc will be showing in Leafpad & available for me to edit & then save the changes.

You can of course use the buttons to call programs that have nothing to do with any of the files in your Worker display. You can run scripts, simple or complex from a button, as normal user or with root privileges, you can combine applications & scripts & most anything else you can come up with to work in sequence. It is up to your imagination &/or needs, to do what you want to do with Worker.

For me Worker is perfect.  After all these years of using Worker, I'm still finding things that I can do with Worker to make it suit me even better (that's apart from my swapping an application that I call from Worker to do whatever, for another that has similar capabilities, this happens from time to time).

==Backup your ~/.worker/config & use it elsewhere==

You can save your custom ~/.worker/config file ''(it is a '''REALLY''' good idea to keep a backup of this file)''. Apart from saving your configuration from being lost to corruption or whatever, you can transfer your ~/.worker/config file to other installations of Linux (it can run on OS/X too, but it is messy to get it functioning there). You can also edit the ~/.worker/config file directly with a text editor, which can be useful sometimes.

I'll give an example: I use a 24" 1920x1200 res' display on my main machine. The fonts that I use in Worker range in size from 18 to 24 points. If I transfer my ~/.worker/config file to another system that is using a smaller lower res' monitor, when I then run Worker with my transferred custom config on that machine, the display will be very wrong making Worker pretty unusable. I won't be able to use the Worker Configuration GUI to modify the font size, as the large fonts have made it impossible to do so (can't see/access all the necessary parts of the Worker Configuration GUI).

So I just go in to the ~/.worker/config file with a text editor, scroll down to the font section & change the sizes. Save it, restart Worker, go into the Worker Configuration GUI (which I can now use) & then adjust/fine tune the config to suit the new machine.

If you ever strike this problem, this is the part of the ~/.worker/config file you need to edit. The following starts at '''line number 148''' on my machine currently, so that gives you an idea of around where to go looking:

By looking at the above you can see that it is the '''xfgfonts''' section that is where the large 18 -> 24 size fonts are, so you just make all those numbers suitably smaller & change nothing else, then you can use the Worker Configuration GUI to fine tune your imported settings to suit the new machine.

When I import the setting to another machine, I first install Worker then I just copy my backup ~/.worker/config file into the same location on the new machine. It is the simplest most effective method as it totally replaces the original file.

 

For the button that I use to create a new text file, I use the following command (bold italic) accessed this way:

Of those 47 Options, I have the need to use very few of them. When you look at what the options can do, you will see that you can get very sophisticated. Me, I only have comparatively simple requirements of Worker.

The previous image shows some of those 47 Option flags in the window on the right hand side of the image. The image also shows some other stuff that was discussed in the previous section or two.  

==Inbuilt Commands==

 

The following screenshot shows some of those 61 commands.

You can also have more than one command listed in sequence. Meaning that when setting up a button to do what you want, after the creation of a command, instead of OK'ing out of that window, you add another command, & if needed you keep doing this.

The above image already has a command (it uses Geegie to show an image that has been selected in one of Worker's file lists), you can add more commands if you need to sequence them for some reason, the commands can be any mixture of both inbuilt commands & external programs.   

 

 

=Support=

Following is a link to this page's forum counterpart where you can post any related feedback: [https://forum.manjaro.org/t/wiki-worker-an-introduction-to-the-highly-configurable-file-manager/17667]