Menu Sections | Contents | Rarely Asked Questions

## FAQ

- Why can't 4Pane be like other file managers and have icon-view/one-pane options? There are already plenty of file managers that do that. 4Pane is for people (like me) who want the increased information that a list-view provides, and the ease of navigation that you get with a separate directory pane.
- OK, but I can't see all that information: with four panes there isn't enough screen width.
  Well, there is a scrollbar... Anyway:
  - You can shrink other panes by dragging their vertical borders, giving more room to the file-view.
  - You don't have to display all of the file-view columns, only the ones that you're interested in.
  - You can use View > Unsplit Panes so that only one pair of panes is displayed.
- Why doesn't 4Pane look up the mime-type of each file it displays?
  Speed. Opening my /usr/bin directory containing several thousand files used to take less than a second in 4Pane, compared with 15 seconds in Konqueror. Admittedly that was some time ago, and the difference is much less with a more modern computer. Nevertheless, why spend time and cpu cycles checking when you hardly ever need to know the answers?
- Why isn't 4Pane an ftp client/web browser/dvdrom burner?
  Because it's a file manager. It tries to do one thing, well. If you want to burn a dvdrom, use a dvdrom burner.
- Why doesn't 4Pane use the orthodox Commander-style shortcuts?
  Because it doesn't try to be a Commander-style file manager. Apart from standard things like Ctrl-C for Copy, it uses a mixture of PowerDesk and Konqueror shortcuts. However you can configure the shortcuts to suit your preferences.