tie-fm

A twin-panel file manager for local disks and tie collections.

Panes and tabs

Each pane has its own tabs, history, breadcrumb (editable in place) and bookmarks. Ctrl+Tab switches panes, Ctrl+T opens a tab, Ctrl+W closes it, and Ctrl+click on a folder opens it in a new tab. Ctrl+I filters the current page.

Bookmarks remember both a path and a collection, so a bookmark can point inside a tie library.

Copying into tie

The Copy/Move into tie as ▸ menu offers the eight built-in dir-types plus custom ones. Re-importing a changed directory creates a version; the old tree remains addressable.

The operations panel supports pause, resume and stop. Conflicts offer skip, rename, overwrite and apply-to-all, in a Dolphin-style dialog.

Album import

Import as albums… discovers albums from a music root and places each one with a template:

/{albumartist}/{year} - {album}/cd{disc}

The dry run lists every discovered album and destination. MusicBrainz matching can use a local Postgres mirror (TIE_FM_MB_DSN) or the web service; Fill missing covers… writes the resolved art back into the album directory or the collection, depending on the mode. Use as album cover is available on any image in the pane.

Tags

With no selection, the tag panel filters the pane. With rows selected, it edits their tags. Favourite tags are shared with tie-view and tie-audio. Directories are taggable; the dir-type dialog sets the type without the CLI.

Preview and media

Preview mode turns either pane into a thumbnail grid with an in-image viewer and a video player. It uses the same gallery/ engine as imgview. Archive extraction is on the context menu.

On Linux, USB drives are discovered through udisks2 and MTP phones through libmtp, with a gvfs fallback. Other platforms build without the device manager.

File associations

Per-extension associations can open a file with an external app, stream it from tie, or hand a tie: URL to tie-view or tie-audio. The context menu’s Open with… is the same table.

Delete

See What Delete means. The short version: local rows delete the file; tie rows remove the reference and keep the content-addressed blob.