Tips & techniques for Users of Sunsoft Solaris
As you probably know, it's easy to spend an inordinate amount of time in File Manager moving up, down, back, and forth through your hard drive's directory structure. This problem is especially frustrating when you consider that most Solaris users spend a majority of their time working in relatively few folders. However, unless you've discovered File Manager's Go To menu, you can spend a lot of time getting back and forth between those folders.
In this article, we'll explain how the Go To menu can minimize the time you spend in File Manager. In addition, we'll show you how to add the folders you frequent the most to the Go To menu so you can return to any one of them with only two mouse clicks.
Whenever you're in File Manager, you can click the Go To button to display the Go To menu shown in Figure A. By default, this menu shows options for returning to your home directory, opening a folder view of your current location, and looking in the Wastebasket. In addition, the Go To menu displays the last ten folders you've visited in File Manager. You can return immediately to any one of those folders simply by clicking on its entry in the Go To menu.
Even in its default configuration, the Go To menu is extremely useful. However, you can greatly enhance its power by adding your own favorite locations to the menu.
Perhaps the most important concept to understand before you customize the Go To menu is that each user has his or her own personal Go To menu. Therefore, the changes you make to the Go To menu will be available only to your user account.
To begin customizing the menu, click the Edit button and select Properties... from the Edit menu. When you see the FM: Properties window shown in Figure B, click the Category button and select Go To Menu Defaults from the resulting menu.
After switching categories, you'll see the window shown in Figure C where you can configure the default settings for the Go To menu. Remember when we said that the Go To menu displays the last ten folders you've visited? It turns out that the value 10 is a configurable default. Therefore, if you want the menu to instead show the last 20 folders you've visited--or no folders at all--you can do so using the control at the bottom of the window.
In addition, notice that the list box in this window contains the single entry Home. The option for moving to your home directory is always present--you can't delete or change it. Notice also that the Folder View and Waste options don't appear in the list box. They are permanent options and don't appear here because, unlike the Home option, they don't represent folders on the hard drive.
To add a folder to the list box, you enter the folder's pathname in the Pathname field and a user-friendly name for the folder in the Menu Label field. For example, suppose you want to add an entry for the folder /export/home/davidr. To do so, you'd enter this pathname in the Pathname field. Next, you'd enter a self-explanatory name, such as David R's Home Directory,in the Menu Label field. Then, you'd click the Add Item button to add the new entry to the list.
When you click Add Item, Solaris validates the data in the Pathname field by checking to make sure the folder exists. If the folder doesn't exist, you'll receive an error message. Solaris won't allow you to add an invalid entry to the Go To list.
After adding an entry to the list, you can examine the associated pathname by highlighting the entry in the Go To Menu Items box. For example, in Figure D we've highlighted the entry David R's Home Directory so the window will show us the entry's data in the Pathname and Menu Label fields. If you want, you can use this data as a template for entering the next menu entry; simply edit the text in the two fields and click Add Item to add the new entry to the list.
In Figure D, we also show the Edit menu, which you can open by clicking the Edit button beside the Go To Menu Items list box. You use the options on this menu to remove and copy list entries and to rearrange the items in the list. The Paste submenu has Before, After, Top, and Bottom options, which allow great flexibility in positioning items in the list.
When you finish adding entries to the Go To menu, you must save your changes before closing the FM: Properties window. If you click only the Apply button, the updated Go To menu will last only through the current Solaris session. In order to make the changes permanent, you must click Apply and then click the Save as Defaults button.
After you apply the changes, click the pushpin in the upper-left corner of the FM: Properties window to return to File Manager. Then, click the Go To button to open the Go To menu. The new entry will now appear directly under the Home entry, as shown in Figure E. You can now change to the associated folder simply by selecting the new entry from the menu.
Even with the default settings, Solaris provides a highly productive work environment. However, by customizing DeskSet applications such as File Manager, you can streamline Solaris to reflect the way you work.
In this article, we've shown you how to customize File Manager's Go To menu. Once you've added entries to the Go To menu for the folders you frequently visit, you can jump from one folder to another very quickly and with a minimum of effort.
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