I must admit: I feel myself a very dumb person. Since I received my L5 a year ago, I figured out how to do many things, but I still can’t find out how to use the default file manager:
it is easy to create unintended copies of files/directories instead of opening them (I believe that some of my taps are interpreted by the file manager as “select and drag away” due to inaccuracy of my fingers);
even more, I can’t just delete these new duplicates in-place: when I open the dropdown-menu on the newly created copy and then try to tap the appropriate menu entry to delete the selected file/directory, the menu just disappears with no result (as if I would tap outside of the menu to just close it). This means that I regularly have to delete such unintended copies via terminal, which is pretty annoying.
No, it takes some fitnesse to drag over files and folders. How I do it is that I hold my finger in place within the directory for half a second, then immediately start dragging in any direction to create a select box.
I recommend Portfolio as an alternative file manager. It’s possible to set it as default as well (but off the top of my head I forgot how and didn’t take notes when I did so previously…)
Just use the terminal keyboard with the menu-button. If you don’t know how: open your on-screen-keyboard, hit the button with orb symbol and choose the terminal one. There you have a _< button or similar and then you find the menu-button. It simulates the right click correctly. This is the easiest solution until Crimson gets the stable release.
Maybe this is weird, but I have been using Librem 5 as a daily driver for a year and I never really had this problem. When I think about it, usually if I was making folders or doing fun things like that, I was either using the terminal app which I use heavily, or else I was opening a PDF of a ticket downloaded from a browser for use with an airplane or train – and for those, I was able to press Downloads and then the PDF in the file manager, which was about all I needed.
So, this might be a personal problem on my part that I should use file management more, but I wanted to put in a good word for the Terminal app as a possible solution to problems. mv Name OtherName renames a file or folder called “Name” to “OtherName”, cd OtherName will browse into a folder called OtherName, the command ls will show what is in the current folder, and mkdir SomeFolder will make a folder called SomeFolder. Maybe I’m just being a cliche nerd, but these work quite well for me.
Also cp A B to make a copy of A named B, or cp -r A B to make a copy of an entire directory A named B, are generally extremely useful. (But, with these and with mv and a few others, there is no undo, so do not make typos.)
