>>10,35Anytime you change your terminal or root editor in Preferences|Advanced, it will try to save these settings as root to /etc/spacefm. This is optional but recommended (you can just cancel the password prompt if you don’t want to.) However, without being saved as root, those settings are vulnerable, and can create a root exploit. For example, if you save your root editor as ‘nano’, and skip the root password, then it will be saved to your session file in your home directory, with normal user permissions. This means someone or something could tamper with that file, changing the editor to ‘trojan ; nano’. When you edit as root, you will think you’re just running nano as root, but you’ll also be running the trojan as root, which can do anything. So that mechanism helps protect your system.
Personally, if I’m doing much as root I think its more secure to just run spacefm as root – that way all preferences and processes are root owned. This is about equivalent to running Synaptic as root (gtk) except spacefm doesn’t access the network. Of course everyone has their own preferences regarding root, and keep in mind that spacefm is still in testing.