Quick Tour

nonmodal dialogs for multitasking


Tactile Interrogator is a different kind of program. The first thing you'll notice is that the about box doesn't prevent you from using other windows - it's just another window. This is done specifically so that you can work faster. Many of the things Interrogator does happen asynchronously, in the background while you work. You don't have to wait for anything, and you don't have to dismiss dialogs immediately.



Tactile Interrogator is a different kind of file manager. It uses icon sizes to show the sizes of files, and it uses colors to show the ages of files. So, for instance, in the picture here, at a glance:

1) You can see which files are big and which are small.

2) You can see that all of these files were created at about the same time, because they are all the same color.


For a directory, the size is of course the size of all of the files inside, including all of the subdirectories and their subdirectories, and so on. Similarly, the color for a directory is calculated based upon all of the files inside the directory and all of its subdirectories - the color is based upon the most recent date of all of those files - because a change to any of those files is, in a way, a change to the directory.

The most important two colors to remember are:

Yellow new (hot)
Blue old (cold)


lots of windows and how to deal with them

Watch the directory Additional Desktop Pictures. At first, it's old - all the files in it were installed with the operating system more than a year ago.

If we go and change one file inside, the file becomes yellow, because its date is suddenly new again. But notice also how each parent directory also becomes yellow - something was changed inside, and therefore the directory was effectively changed.

Whenever you find a yellow directory, you know something inside was changed recently. By opening up subdirectories, you can drill down and see exactly what was changed.




On Mac OS, the icons display in Classic Icons mode, where the classic file icons are simply colorized according to the Interrogator colors. Although more attractive, this style of icon can mislead you as to the color, and therefore the age, of the file.

You can change this to Simple Icons mode with a menu command. Use the View menu on Mac OS, or the contextual menu on X11.




Simple Icons mode displays simplified icons that make it easier to see the colors. They're also faster. Not only that, but the outside of the icons are colored according to the access time - the time the file was last read by a program. Notice also that the icon for zcmd.plist is a bit different - an icon that's torn off on the bottom tells you that the file is empty.

(On X11 at this writing, there is no Classic mode.)

The View menu has many more options for viewing Directory Windows; these are explained in the Directory Window section.

Touch Targeting


By simply typing into a directory window, you can select files. Not just the first character - keep on typing until you select what you want. Backspace acts as you would expect, and the selection shows the files you have selected in the moment.

You can also type in Unix shell wildcard characters - asterisk, question mark and [brackets]. You can also use Tab to speed your typing.

By typing a slash, you can open the directory that you selected. In this way, you can type in a complete Unix pathname to navigate there.

If this was a word processor, the keystrokes you type would be inserted into your document. Since this software deals with files, you want more control. Regular keystrokes simply select files. Similarly, text that you Paste goes to selecting files, too. Copy and Paste commands on the Edit menu deal with file names, or full pathnames. By copying filenames only (such as exception.h) rather than full pathnames (such as /calistoga/dev/v2.21/exception.h), you can refer to files of the same name in a different directory. Pasting a complete pathname will locate and open the needed directory. The text copied and pasted is compatible with the command line.

You can also use copy and paste to move and copy files, and to create links and aliases. These commands use different keystrokes, with more modifiers, because they actually result in filesystem side effects - files or directories are created, deleted or changed. For more details, see the copying tutorial.

Interrogator, as you can see, allows quite a few keystroke commands. These are shown on the menus. You can also see a quick summary by typing the keystrokes in the table.
(Think U I = User Interface.)

  X11 MacOS
User Interface
Quick Reference
altU altI ^U ^I



Full Disclosure

Tactile Interrogator, as its name implies, retrieves a lot of information from the filesystem about your files. You can look at this information by choosing Full Disclosure from the View menu. Just click on files, or click and drag to select a group of files, to learn about them.

For directories and groups of files, most of the statistics are aggregates: sizes are the size totals of ALL of the files you select, and all of the files in all subdirectories. It also shows you the earliest and latest dates, the most permissive and most restrictive permissions, etc.

More Information

You can learn more about Tactile Interrogator from other parts of the documentation. In particular, you can look up words in the Glossary, or if you are familiar with the command line, look up commands to see how to do the same thing in Interrogator.



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