Introduction

System Requirements

You can use Kyklops on following platforms:

• Linux: any Debian-based (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, ...) or Fedora-based (Fedora, CentOS, AlmaLinux, ...) distribution supporting the .deb  or .rpm  format respectively. It will also work in other Linux variants if you take care of manually installing the provided components.
• MacOS: any current version of macOS x64 (from 10.13 to the newest).
• Windows: any current version of Microsoft Windows 32 or 64 bits (from XP to the most recent).

Installation

Just download the installer corresponding to your platform and double-click the downloaded file following the system instructions. Or on the terminal:

Linux DEB

> sudo dpkg -i kyklops_1.0.6_amd64.deb

Linux RPM

> sudo rpm -i kyklops-1.0.6-rel.x86_64.rpm

MacOS

> installer -pkg kyklops-1.0.6.pkg -target /

Windows x86

> msiexec /i kyklops-1.0.6-x86.msi

Windows x64

> msiexec /i kyklops-1.0.6-x64.msi

Licensing

The program you download is just a test version that will be valid for 30 days. Once the evaluation period has elapsed, you must register your copy of Kyklops in order to continue using it. The option Program Registration of the Main Menu will connect you to the registration web site so you can purchase a license, and upon completion of this procedure you will receive per mail your unique registration key that will unlock your copy of the program and will register you as an acknowledged user, granting you support and privileged access to new releases.

User Interface

Main View

When launching Kyklops you will be placed in its main user interface, which appears always where you closed it the last time. You can tailor the dimensions of this view to your convenience, and they will also be remembered for the next session. Usually you will not need very much place for this window, as it has been designed to encompass all the essential information within a square of no much more than 500 pixels, what makes it possible to keep it open all the time without encumbering your screen. Any additional views open from this main interface will place themselves related to it, so if you reserve a corner of your screen for Kyklops it will help you all the time without hiding any other windows you are working on.

The main view contains following components:

Navigation Buttons

The blue navigation buttons placed on the top left corner of the view will allow you to move quickly and comfortably through your filesystem. At any moment you can access the upper folder with the upwards arrow as well as the previous and next folders of your navigation history with the leftwards and rightwards arrows. If you want to see all the steps of this history in a list, just right-click on these buttons and you will be able to choose directly a target among the folders you have visited during the session. Holding the pointer one second over any of these buttons will tell you in a tooltip where it will lead you immediately.

You can also activate these buttons with the keyboard, using the key combinations Alt-Up, Alt-Left and Alt-Right. Just after reaching the upper folder from one of its branches, you can also return to the subfolder you came from using the keys Alt-Down.

Location

The field "Location" on the top of the main view reflects your current standpoint: the whole view is showing you the contents of this folder.

This field will be populated automatically while you navigate through your filesystem, but you can also enter a value on it to go directly to a folder of your choice. This value must be in the form of an absolute path starting at the root of your filesystem. If the folder you specify doesn't exist, Kyklops will ask you if you want to create it, what provides you with another way of creating folders besides from the option New Folder in the main menu and the corresponding key combination Ctrl-N.

By opening the drawer of the "Location" field, you can access a list of all folders where you have previously been working in the current or preceding sessions. You can easily return to any of these folders by choosing the corresponding option on this list.

File Filter

The field "Filter" to the right of the "Location" field is a helper tool aimed at creating subsets of files from the contents of the folder you are browsing. If you are only interested on a particular group of files and don't want to see the remaining items, you can specify a pattern to select your target files and only these ones will be listed, together with any existing subfolders if your preferences allow for it. This pattern is not a regular expression, it's just a shell glob containing literal characters or the metacharacters ? and * as they are used in the command-line interface. So for instance to select just the PNG files in a folder you would write a filter like:

*.png

For more complex selections you will have to use the Search View, where advanced tools are available like regular expressions or subfolder scanning, but using a filter is sometimes more convenient and will allow you to keep the target folder as your current stand point, so if you move from it to other related folders and return later to it through your navigation history, you will find that your filter is there still active. It is therefore important to always take a look at the contents of the filter field when entering a new location, because it will tell you if the listed files represent the whole contents of that folder or just a particular selection.

Main Menu

In the upper right corner of the main view you will find the menu icon that will allow you to open the Main Menu: this menu contains all the options that are not related to a particular item and will allow you to perform different kind of actions on the current folder, like searching, bookmarking or creating new files and folders, as well as to configure Kyklops to adapt its behavior to your personal preferences.

Preferences

The option "Preferences" will open the Preferences View where you can customize the behavior of the program to suit your needs. This view can also be opened by pressing the key F12.

File Openers

The option "File Openers" will open the Openers View where you can choose your own programs to open the files of each type. You can also open this view by right-clicking on the Open Button at the bottom of the main view.

Action Keys

The option "File Manager Keys" will allow you to look up at any time which key combinations are available to perform the most common actions. This view will disappear by itself as soon as you move the focus to a different window, but it will appear exactly in the same place when opening it again.

View Clipboard

The option "View Clipboard" opens the Clipboard View where you can check the contents of your clipboard and manage it in different ways. These contents are generated either by using the options Copy/Cut/Link in the context menu when a selection is active, or by clicking on the Clipboard Button on the lower right corner of the main view. In the first case the contents of the clipboard will be replaced by the current selection, in the second case the current selection will be added to the existing content, allowing you to cumulate items coming from different locations.

Paste

The option "Paste" in the Main Menu allows you to dump the contents of the clipboard to the folder currently open in the main view. It is equivalent to the option Paste All of the Clipboard View and will use the currently active modality to paste the contents. You can also perform this action with the key combination Ctrl-V.

Find Files

The option "Find Files" allows you to open the Search View, where you can specify diferent criteria to locate the items you are looking for.

Last Results

The option "Last Results" will reopen the Search Results View of the last search operation performed through the option Find Files. This will allow you to access its set of files again or to refine the search by tuning its search criteria.

New Folder

The option "New Folder" will allow you to create a new folder in the current directory. You must provide for it an unique name that does not conflict with any other of the items already existing in this directory.

New Document

The option "New Document" will allow you to create a new file in the current directory. You must provide for it a name that doesn't conflict with any one of the items already existing in this directory.

New Window

The option "New Window" will allow you to clone the main view in its current state, opening the same location you are browsing in a parallel interface. From there you can easily move to any related folders, and transfer files between them in a convenient way.

You can clone your main view any number of times, but these secondary views are dependent on the views from which they originated, and will be automatically closed with them.

Bookmark Location

The folder currently open in your main view can be inserted as a custom entry point in the Bookmark Panel by using this option. You can also perform this action with the key combination Shift-F8.

Properties

This option will allow you to open the Properties View for the current location. It will place you momentarily in the upper folder so you can see your item in context, but will return automatically to the current level as soon as you close the properties view.

Save Session / Restore Session

The option "Save Session" will allow you to store in a new record the list of files you have opened in the current session so you can reopen them later automatically using the option "Restore Session". There is only one session stored at any point in time, so saving the current session will erase any other sessions you had previously stored under your account.

Open Terminal

The option "Open Terminal" will deploy a new terminal window on your desktop anchored on the folder you are currently browsing. This will make easy for you to perform punctual maintenance tasks on this folder at the low level.

Run Command

With the option "Run Command" you can directly issue a shell command to be executed in the current folder, just as if you were placed in the CLI. A terminal window will be automatically opened and closed for you as required by the specified command.

About Kyklops

This option will allow you to lookup which version of Kyklops you are using and where it is installed on your filesystem. It will also tell you which third-party modules are being used in the internals of Kyklops.

Program Registration

Once the evaluation period has elapsed, you must register your copy of Kyklops in order to continue using it. This view will connect you to the registration web site so you can purchase a license, and upon completion of this procedure you will receive per mail your unique registration key to be inserted in the bottom field of this view. This will unlock your copy of the program so you can continue working with it and will register you as an acknowledged user granting you support and privileged access to new releases.

Bookmark Panel

The gray panel you see at the left side of the main view holds the entry points through which you can to access your folder tree. Some options on the top of this list are built-in, connecting you to the root filesystem and to your home folders. The remaining options are user-defined and can be edited any time to suit your needs.

By right-clicking on this panel you will be able to add new entries to it assigning them some descriptive names that will clearly tell you which location they are pointing to. You can also drag a folder listed in your main view and drop it into this panel: this will create a link pointing to it. To bookmark the current folder itself you can use the menu option Bookmark Location or the key combination Shift-F8.

Elevator Button

When the directory listing on the center of your main view has been scrolled, you can quickly return to the top of the list by clicking on this button. You can of course get the same result by dragging the scroll bar on the right side of the listing or by using the key combination Ctrl-Home.

Directory Listing

The central area of your main view shows you the contents of the folder you are browsing within an input/output grid. Following columns are provided for each item:

Type

The first column displays an icon letting you know which kind of item you are dealing with. Following types are shown:

• folder
• text file
• image
• document
• archive
• executable
• binary file
• device

A more precise description of this type can be found in the Properties View of each item.

On a folder, if you keep the cursor briefly over this icon you will open a floating window that will sketch you a preliminary view of its contents.

By clicking on the header of this column you can change the way items are sorted in the listing of this folder, bypassing the general settings recorded in your preferences. If folders are currently shown in a separate sequence on the top of the list (as it is done by default) this will sort them mixed with the regular files in the alphabetical order currently active. Otherwise, this will return you to the standard double-segment model.

Name

This column displays the name of the file or folder as known to the filesystem and can be used to change this name either by choosing the option Rename in the context menu or by pressing the key F2.

By clicking on the header of this column you can set the sorting mode of the listing to alphabetical based on the item name, and by repeatedly clicking on it you can toggle between ascending and descending order, as shown by the symbol to the right of this column.

Size

The column "Size" shows for a folder the number of items it contains, and for a regular file its occupation on the disk. For convenience, this occupation is shown in different units (B for bytes, KB for kilobytes, MB for megabytes, and so on), but you can always find out the exact number of bytes by looking at the Properties View of this item. Compound units are always computed as multiples of 1024.

For items that are links to other items, since the byte occupation is then not meaningful, the "Size" column is used to show an arrow that will allow you to jump directly to the location of the target item: there you will see the real occupation of the item in disk.

By clicking on the header of this column you can set the sorting mode of the listing to numerical based on the size, and by repeatedly clicking on it you can toggle between ascending and descending order, as shown by the symbol to the right of this column.

Modified

The column "Modified" shows the date and time of the last modification performed on the item. This refers to any changes made to the contents of the file, not to those affecting just its metadata.

By clicking on the header of this column you can sort the listing by modification date, and by repeatedly clicking on it you can toggle between ascending and descending order, as shown by the symbol to the right of this column.

Tag

The column "Tag" shows graphically the color tag that has been assigned to the item. By clicking on this column you can access the color palette and choose a tag among the standard colors to classify the item. This tag will appear also in the Properties View of the item, and can be used to look for it in the Search View.

By clicking on the header of this column you can sort the listing numerically based on the value of the tag, which corresponds to the position of its color within the color palette, and by repeatedly clicking on it you can toggle between ascending and descending order, as shown by the symbol to the right of this column.

Comment

The column "Comment" displays the comment assigned to the item, and can be used to edit it by clicking on this field when the item is selected. A more convenient way to read and edit the comment is provided in the Properties View of the item.

Accessed

The column "Accessed" shows the date and time when the item was last accessed, on systems that allow for it.

Owner

On systems that keep track of the user who owns each file, this column shows the name of the owner and lets you know thereby who can operate on that item with the owner rights shown in the next column.

Rights

The column "Rights" shows in octal form the bitmask of permissions assigned to different kind of users to operate on this file. The meaning of the bitmask is identical to that used by the underlying file system. A more convenient way to read and also change these rights is provided in the Properties View of the item.

Target

The column "Target" is used only for links, and displays the full path of the item pointed to by the current file. By clicking on the arrow shown in the "Size" column you can reach this target directly.

Preview Window

The window on the lower left corner of the main view shows a raw preview of the item currently selected on the listing. For images (jpeg, png, svg, tiff, gif, bmp, ico, swf, webp) a graphical representation is shown, built in fast mode for efficiency. For pdf documents, the first page is quickly drawn. For textual files, the very first lines of the content are roughly depicted using a preview font. For binary items, a hexadecimal dump of the initial bytes is provided to allow for a quick discrimination of the type of data they contain.

By double-clicking on this field, you can open an external sizeable window where this preview will be presented in more detailed form.

Filename

The field "Filename" on the bottom of the main view displays the name of the item currently selected: this is the file or folder that will be opened when you confirm your choice by double-clicking on the item or pressing the button "Open". With plural selections, only the name of the item holding the current position is depicted, although the action may affect the whole selection.

This field can also be used to move the current position within the directory listing: by typing the beginning of a filename, the listing view will locate any matching files in the current folder and bring them to the foreground. Reaching this field with the Tab key will allow you to replace its current contents with the name of the file you are searching.

Open Button

The "Open" button will allow you to act on the currently selected item by handling it to the application selected to open that type of files. If no application has been defined for it, Kyklops will try to see if the file is of textual nature, in which case if a text editor has been defined in the settings of your operating system, it will use that editor to open the selected file.

When the selection is multiple, all the selected items will be handled together to the target application, that must be able to deal with them.

By right-clicking on this button you can open the File Openers View and change your program associations.

Clipboard Button

The clipboard button on the bottom-right corner of the main view will help you to carrying your files from one place to another. The icon depicted on it reflects the current state of the clipboard in the following ways:

• the clipboard is empty
• the clipboard contains items in the modality "Copy"
• the clipboard contains items in the modality "Move"
• the clipboard contains items in the modality "Link"

Feeding the clipboard can be done by using the specific menu options Copy/Cut/Link of the context menu, which will replace the whole contents of the clipboard with the new selection and will set the corresponding modality on the clipboard, or by clicking on the clipboard button when a selection is active: in this case the selection will be added to the clipboard contents in the modality currently active (or as "Copy" if no modality has been previously defined).

By right-clicking on this button, you can open the Clipboard View that will allow you to check the clipboard contents and paste them to the target folder in different ways.

Context Menu

The context menu opens when right-clicking on any item in the directory listing. It allows you to perform following actions on it:

Properties

This option will open the Properties View of the item.

Open

This option will open the application associated to the file type of the current item, if any, and will handle the current item to it.

Open With

This option will allow you to choose an particular application to open the current file.

Copy/Cut/Link

These options will allow you to feed the clipboard in the corresponding mode. All items currently selected will be inserted into the clipboard, replacing any content previously existing there.

Rename

This option will allow you to assign a new name to the current item. This action can also be performed by pressing the key F2.

Duplicate

This option will allow you to create a copy of the current item in the same folder. This action can also be performed by pressing the key Ctrl-D.

Archive

This option will allow you to create a zip archive in the current folder containing all the items currently selected.

Upload

This option will allow you to quickly send the currently selected file to a remote FTP server.

Remove

This option will move the current selection to the waste bin, keeping the names of the files when possible to allow you to restore them if needed.

Delete

This option will delete all the items currently selected in an irreversible way, so that they cannot be accessed anymore.

Preferences View

The Preferences View can be opened from the Main Menu with the Preferences option or pressing the key F12. It allows to customize the behavior of the program in the following ways:

Language

You can choose the language of the user interface from the list of supported languages, that currently include: Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. If you want to help us adding a new language to this list, and can provide the corresponding literals, we will be grateful and will take care of making it available in the very next version.

Panel Layout

You can specify here the panel layout you want to use for the Directory Listing of the main view: it can have only one panel, showing the contents of the current folder, or rather two or three panels showing also the tree structure of its immediate upper levels. This model allows you to keep visually track of the folders above the one where you are placed, making it easy to change location between them when you are moving frequently in a particular region of your folder tree.

On the main view, you can switch anytime between these different models by pressing the key F3.

Modalities

The flags in the right side of this view will allow you to customize the way items are sorted in the directory listing:

Sort uppercase before lowercase

This flag will allow you to handle uppercase letters as different from lowercase, ranging before them. Otherwise both forms will be considered equivalent and sorted as if they were the same.

Sort name digits numerically

By choosing this option you will get a listing where a sequence of digits appearing in equally starting filenames will be interpreted and sorted as numbers, laying a result where file9.txt ranges before file10.txt. Otherwise, file10.txt will range before, because names will be compared alphabetically.

Don't show items starting with a dot

You can hide with this option all the files and folders that have an initial dot in their name (which are considered internal in many operating systems). When this option is not signaled, those items are shown just as normal files.

Sort folders together with files

Folders are usually shown at the top of the directory listing, to make them more easily accessible. However, if you want to see all items in a continuous sequence, you can select this option and then folders will be sorted as if they were regular files.

Apply filters to folder names

Filters specified in the File Filter field are normally applied to regular files and not to folders, so that the tree structure remains always visible. If you want that filters affect equally all items in the list, you can select this option and then folders will only be shown when they match the specified criteria.

Show subfolder preview

This option allows you to open a floating window showing a preview of the folder contents when holding the mouse pointer over the icon of a subfolder in the directory listing.

Show widget tooltips

The floating help informations that are shown for some input fields or some list items when holding the mouse on them will only appear when this option is signaled.

File Openers View

This view can be opened from the Main Menu or by right-clicking on the Open Button at the bottom of the main view. It allows you to associate each one of your file types with a program of your preference.

With the option "Insert" you can add new items to this list, specifying the file type in the left column through the suffix of the filename, and selecting the associated program either by entering its full path in the middle column or by choosing it with the file selection interfaces available.

These file associations will only be active for the user that has selected them, and will not conflict with the choices of another user or with any parameters defined by your desktop environment. You can return at any moment to the system defaults using the option "Reset".

File Type

You can specify the file type by entering the suffix of the file name (e.g. txt).

Associated Program

If you know the exact ubication of your program, you can enter its full path here. Otherwise, you can choose it from the list of standard applications that appear in the drawer. By clicking on the the third column you can also open a file selection interface to pick your target program from the filesystem.

Properties View

This view can be opened from the context menu or by pressing the key combination Ctrl-I. It will show you detailed information about the the current item, and will allow you to assign some identification attributes to it.

Tag

You can choose a color tag from the standard color palette to characterize the current item. It can be used then to look for it in the searching interface.

Categories

You can also assign some arbitrary keywords to the item, to classify it more specifically. Such keywords will allow you to refine the search when looking for it. You can use here any term of your choice or even expressions containing punctuation or spaces, but commas are reserved to separate different categories from each other.

Comment

You can write a comment in the bottom text editor to provide more detailed information about the current item. This comment will appear on the main directory listing as well, although only the first words will be immediately visible there.

Clipboard View

The Clipboard view can be opened by right-clicking on the Clipboard Button on the bottom-right corner of the main view, or by choosing the option View Clipboard on the main menu. It will allow you to see what are the current contents of the clipboard and to perform different kind of actions on it.

Three types of clipboards are available, depending on the action used to feed it: when creating a clipboard with "Copy", the contents will be replicated in the folder where you paste them, when creating a clipboard with "Cut", the contents will be moved to the new location, and when creating a clipboard with "Link", symbolic links will be created in the target location pointing to the source files. When feeding the clipboard with the Clipboard Button, the clipboard keeps its current action, that is applied to the newly added items. The same occurs when new elements are pasted per Drag & Drop into this view. If the clipboard is empty in that moment, the action "Copy" is assumed.

Pay attention when opening this view to its title bar: it will tell you which is the modality currently active on the clipboard, that is, if the items stored on it will be copied, moved or linked when pasting them to the target folder. In the first and third cases, items will be kept in their source folders after pasting, in the second case, they will be removed from the source folder, where they are momentarily depicted in red to denote that they are being extracted. In order to change this modality you must reset the clipboard and select its contents again.

Following actions are available to manage the clipboard contents:

Paste All

When choosing "Paste All" the whole contents of the clipboard will be dumped to the target folder, either by copying, moving or linking them.

Paste Selected

If you select some items on the clipboard list and then choose "Paste Selected", only the selected items will be dumped to the target folder, either by copying, moving or linking them. You can change your selection afterwards to affect a different set of files in the next paste operation.

Make Archive

This option will allow you to create a zip archive containing the whole contents of the clipboard. That makes it easy to store them in a secure location or to transfer them to a different host.

Reset

The option "Reset" will initialize the clipboard contents to an empty list and will allow you to start selecting its contents again.

Search View

The search view can be opened either from the main menu choosing the option Find Files or by pressing Ctrl-F on any field. It will allow you to locate the files you are looking for using different search criteria based on the name of the file, the tag you assigned to it and any associated categories. These criteria are cumulative, that is if you specify several conditions the results will include only those files that match all these conditions (with the exception of the file categories, see below).

Filename

If you know the full name of your target file, you can enter it here in its literal form. If you are not sure about it, or want to match several items with similar names, you can input here a pattern in the form of a Perl-compatible regular expression that will be matched against all target files. In order to handle the value of this field as a regular expression you must also set the flag Regular Expression at the bottom of this view, otherwise what you write here will be considered a literal name.

Tag

In the field "Tag" you can input a color tag choosing it from the standard color palette, to find all items to which this tag was assigned. If this set includes too many of items, you can refine your search by combining this field with the field categories below.

Categories

The field "Categories" allows you to specify one or several keywords to match the items to which such categories have been assigned. When specifying several keywords, these must be separated by commas with any amount of whitespace between them. In this case you can choose between requiring all these categories in the target files or just looking for any one of them. This choice is regulated by the flag Require All Categories at the bottom of this view.

Regular expression

This flag governs the interpretation of the field Filename. When this flag is set, the value of this field will be taken as a regular expression, otherwise it will be considered to be a literal name.

Require all specified categories

When this flag is set, the search results will include only those files that match all the specified categories. Otherwise, matching any one of them will be considered sufficient.

Look also in subfolders

The target files of a search operation include normally just the contents of the directory currently open in the main view. If you want to extend the search to the subfolders of this directory, you can signal this option and then all branches of the current folder will be scanned. You must take into account that depending on the structure of your folder tree, this may require a considerable amount of time.

Search Results

The search results view will open by itself when a search operation is complete, showing a list with all items that match the criteria you specified, which can be checked on the bottom of the view. You can afterwards open the results corresponding to the last search you performed by using the option Last Results on the main menu.

By choosing any item on this list you can reach the location of the corresponding file or folder in the main view.

Modify

The button you find in the lower right corner will allow you to reopen the Search View with the same search criteria that were used to generate the current results. That way you can easily adjust these criteria to refine your search.