The Display
(NB. These images are of 4Pane resized quite small, better to fit on the page. Many more files etc are normally visible at a time: see the Screenshots page.)
You can change the appearance of 4Pane considerably, but when you first run it you will see four panes, arranged side by side in pairs.
The lefthand pane of each pair shows only directories (the dir-view). When you select one of those directories,
its contents (both files and subdirectories) are displayed in the righthand pane (the file-view).
The panes are separated by draggable sashes, so you can adjust their sizes as you need. Each twin-pane is always split vertically, but
you can choose to display one twin-pane above the other, or even to hide one of them. Initially each twin-pane displays your home directory,
but of course you can change this. You can also create extra pages of panes: see the Tabs menu.
People with a preference for keyboard navigation can use shortcuts to move between dir-view and file-view (sh-ctrl-a by default) and to the opposite twin-pane (sh-ctrl-o). If there are
multiple tabs, you can go backwards and forwards between them using sh-ctrl-',' and sh-ctrl-'.' (all these shortcuts can be changed, of course).
Since version 2.0, by default 4Pane uses inotify to keep its display up-to-date. However you can still refresh the currently-selected pane at any time
by clicking Refresh on the Context Menu, or by pressing F5.
You can read more about panes in the View Menu and Fileview columns.
Below the panes you can choose to display a Terminal Emulator. This also automatically appears to display the results
when you use Search commands: see Tools.
As you'd expect, 4Pane has a Menu, a Toolbar and a Statusbar.
Having got 4Pane organised as you wish, you can save the settings from the Options menu. You can also configure many aspects of the display from the Configure menu.
Using 4Pane
Contents