Adding a text editor and a file manager

Now we've got some gui-ness going, but it looks like hell and that's just embarassing. To get fluxbox customized we're gonna need to navigate around our filesystem and edit a few text files. Now we can easily do that the badass way from the command line using ls, cd, and vi, but instead lets go ahead and fill out our graphical environment with a text editor and a file manager.

Once we've booted up, logged in, and done a "startx" to bring up fluxbox we can right click anywhere on the desktop to pull up a menu. Click Applications -> Terminal Emulators -> XTerm and viola we're back at a cli within our gui. Linux always seems to come back to this...

Now it's time to su to root to install a text editor and a file manager with aptitude. There are a billion different text editors and file managers, the ones below just happen to be my favorites right now so you can either fill in your own favorites (as long as they are in the Debian repos) or try these out for sport. We can install multiple packages with all dependencies by just putting them all in one line like this:
debian:/home/thom# aptitude install geany pcmanfm

After that we can type exit a few times to close out su and the XTerm session. The only price we need to pay for a great file manager and a great text editor is just a little disk space. Now if you right click on the desktop you'll see a few new items in the Applications menu.

• Geany: we can try out Geany by clicking into that new menu item "Progamming" let's go ahead and open it up. I know I called it a text editor but technically it's an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment. If you type programming code into Geany it will recognize what it is and color code comments and alert you to open tags, etc. It can do LOTS of cool stuff, but it's also a heck of a nice text editor that can open many files in tabs for you to copy paste in and out of.

• PCManFM: next let's take a look at that file manager, PCManFM is under our new File Management submenu. When we click it you'll see an error pop up saying that "GTK+ icon theme is not properly set" so we've got something to fix already! Click OK and take a peak at our app, notice the bottom bar where it says "... (XX hidden)" that's how many hidden files we don't see. If we click View and choose Show Hidden Files we'll see what's being hidden by the system. Look for a file named ".gtkrc-2.0" do you see it? If you saw that GTK+ icon error I'm guessing you don't. Lets go ahead and fix that.

1. Right click on the right pane and Create New -> Empty File and name it EXACTLY ".gtkrc-2.0" and hit enter. You should now see that file in PCManFM.
2. Right click the file and choose Open With Geany.
3. In Geany type EXACTLY this "gtk-icon-theme-name="Raleigh"" I know putting double quotes inside of double quotes is bad form, get over your bad self.
4. Save
5. File -> Quit
6. Close PCMamFM
   

Now we can open PCManFM without any errors!

OK, we're gonna follow this basic scheme to fix up lots of stuff in fluxbox. Boot up, login, start fluxbox, open PCManFM to browse to or create config files, then open them in Geany to modify and save. But what happens when we need to go to web pages to copy/paste out of? We'll get a real browser installed next time.