OD Commander

Under construction.

OD commander is a fork of DinguxCommander which is a gamepad-oriented file manager (if you have used some of the weaker SBC handhelds that run Dingoo you may already be familiar with the software). It follows the “x commander” philosophy of having the left panel show the “source” and the right panel show the “destination”, similar to Midnight Commander (which is also already included in Batocera).

Most notably, OD command is available on all platforms (since Batocera v34). OD commander can be opened from the Ports menu.

Controls

Gamepad control (equivalent keyboard key):

  • D-pad (Arrow keys) - Move
  • [L1]/[R1] (Page Up/Page Down) - Page up/page down
  • South button (B SNES) (Enter) - Select (on a directory: open, on a file: view or execute)
  • East button (A SNES) (Backspace) - Go to parent directory/cancel
  • West button (Y SNES) (Esc) - File menu (Available actions: Select all items, Select no items, Create new directory, Display disk information, Quit program)
  • North button (X SNES) (Space) - Context menu (Available actions: Copy to other panel directory, Move to other panel directory, Rename, Delete, Display disk used)
  • [SELECT] (FIXME) - Select highlighted item (selected items are displayed in red)
  • [START] (FIXME) - Open directory in the destination panel (if a file is highlighted, open current directory in the destination panel instead)

In Batocera v34, South button (B SNES) and East button (A SNES) are reversed.

Mice and other cursor devices are supported if one is plugged in! Left click to open/run and right click a file/directory to open the context menu or right click the title bar to open the file menu.

How to use it

Stuff about how this is different from ordinary file managers that use separate instances, focus on the philosophy of dual-pane, etc.

Include another hint on how to Quit the program when done.

OD commander follows the dual-pane setup popular with power-user oriented file managers such as Norton command and Midnight commander.

The left pane (commonly referred to as the “source”) contains one directory and the right pane (commonly referred to as the “destination”) contains another. Files can be freely copied, moved and symlinked to one another.

Press the North button (X SNES) button to bring up the context menu. Any action here that would perform the operation into the directory in the other pane is indicated by a > or a < character, showing which “direction” the operation will take place in. For example, this will copy the file from the right pane (path/to/right) into the left pane (path/to/left):

FIXME (add image/video showing that here)

It's useful to check your remaining free space from time to time as you're copying files around. Press West button (Y SNES) and then go to Disk info to see the current amount of used space compared to the total available.

FIXME (image here showing tooltip)

Editing text documents

OD commander has a built-in text editing software.

Apparently there's also an on-screen keyboard? Can you also use keyboard? Investigate.

Accessing external drives

Since OD commander does not have the “sidebar” like PCmanFM does, it can be more difficult to discover externally attached and mounted storage devices. Instruct users on how to do just that.

Additional drives can be accessed by navigating one level up from userdata (referred to as the “root”) and going to the /media folder:

FIXME: (screenshot showing this)

I accidentally deleted OD commander!

Don't worry, it's not actually possible to do that. But you may have removed its shortcut entry from the gamelist (this is intentional, some people want a very clean gamelist).

If you'd like to regenerate it back, simply delete the /userdata/roms/odcommander folder and reboot Batocera. It will be recreated along with its gamelist on next boot.

  • od_commander.txt
  • Last modified: 15 months ago
  • by atari