File Magic

Default Basic Controls

Press Menu / Controls to change these and see what others are available.

Toolbar

The toolbar is a sliding drawer which is accessed by sliding up the screen from the very bottom (or dragging on the triangular handle).

It is used to:

Actions

File actions are accessed by long-tapping on a file or directory. Some actions require some further explanation.

Audio Sample

Plays a short extract from near the start of an audio file. It requires that
Tasker is installed.

Delete

Deletion of a directory is done recursively, meaning the directory and all of it's contents, including subdirectories, are deleted.

Encrypt/Decrypt

These actions protect files with a high level of security. They require that Tasker is installed.

Hide/UnHide

Hidden files are those which are prefixed by a '.'. In general, these will not show up in the standard applications such as Gallery. Hide/UnHide add and remove the '.' to/from the filename of the selected file or directory.

See the application Preferences if you wish to be able to see these hidden files after hiding them.

Lock/Unlock

The Lock action assigns a passcode to a file so that it cannot be accessed or modified without re-entering of the passcode. Unlock removes the lock.

This is not high-security protection, it is only meant for casual protection e.g. as a child-lock.

If the same passcode is used for several files, entering the code for any of them allows access to the others.

The passcode is cleared if File Magic is exited, or the screen turns off.

Rename

Rename changes the name of a file to a new one within the same directory i.e. you cannot move files/directories to other directories.

Share

Android versions prior to 2.0 only support sharing of a single file at once.

Zip/UnZip

These actions use Tasker to zip or unzip a file. Zip files with directory structures can be handled, but not zip files with nested zip files within them.

File Selection

Selecting Files

There are several options for selecting/deselecting files:

Copy/Move File(s) To A Different Directory

Perform Actions on Multiple Files

The action will be performed on the files one-by-one. If a file in the selection is inappopriate for the selected action, it will be skipped silently.

Selection Notes

Preferences

Some extra information on some preference options.

Cache Image Thumbs

If enabled, thumbnails of any images displayed will be cached on the SD card for reuse, so that the second time a directory is visited loading is much faster. This is most noticeable with very large images or directories containing lots of images.

The thumbnails are relatively small and the space used should barely be noticeable considering the capacities of modern memory cards.

The cache is cleared completely whenever File Magic is started with this setting disabled.

The cache directory is /sdcard/.filer/icache/.

Custom Tasker File/Directory Actions

If Tasker is installed, you can specify here an action to be added to the long-tap action list. When the action is selected, the correspondingly named Tasker action will be carried out on the file or directory (by Tasker).

Custom directory actions are only shown when a directory is long-tapped, file actions only when a file is long-tapped.

You define the effects of the task in Tasker's, the selected file location is referenced by the variable %PATH.

As an examples, you could

Now, whenever you long-tap a file, you would be presented with the Backup option which would make a copy of the file to the directory file-backup.

Skin: Toolbar Icons

If Tasker is installed, you can use it to change the icons displayed in the toolbar.

First use Tasker to download the icon set you want, then the name of the icon set will be available when you tap on the icon in the Skin Preferences screen.

Directory Preferences

You can use the toolbar to dynamically change attributes for the current directory and it's subdirectories. When you return to the directory, the settings will be as you left them the previous time.

An important rule is: a directory will use it's parent (not necessarily it's direct parent) setting for an attribute (e.g. Landscape Columns) unless it has it's own setting.

The toolbar icons behave as follows:

The orange icon label indicates which sort is currently being applied to the files in the directory.

Search

Search is accessed via the Search icon on the toolbar. It is a filename search, it does not search within files.

A maximum of two keywords can be entered, which should be contained in, or at the start or end of the searched-for file. The two keywords can be combined with or, and or and not.

If a keyword is all lower case, it will match case-insensitively e.g. cat will match Cat or cat. If a keyword contains any upper-case letter, it will match case-sensitively e.g. Dog will match only Dog, not DOG or dog.

You can long-tap on a search-result entry just as in normal browse mode, though fewer actions may be possible.

A single tap on a directory in the search results switches to browse mode for that directory.

You can toggle backwards and forwards between browse mode and search mode without losing results.

Known Bugs / Limitations

Licenses

ColorPickerDialog used in Menu / Skin is Copyright (C) 2007 The Android Open Source Project and distributed under the terms of:

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0