Xfce 4 Desktop Manager

Jasper Huijsmans

François Le Clainche

Brian Tarricone

This manual describes xfdesktop version 4.2.

Copyright © 2004 Jasper Huijsmans

Copyright © 2004 François Le Clainche

Copyright © 2004 Brian Tarricone

Table of Contents

Introduction
Backdrops
xfdesktop root menu
About xfdesktop

Introduction

The xfdesktop application manages the desktop backdrop. It sets a backdrop image and/or color and it can pop up an applications menu and a list of all running applications when you click on the desktop with the right or middle mouse button respectively.

The xfdesktop package installs a settings dialog for use with the Xfce 4 Settings Manager. From this dialog you can change the backdrop image and color and change settings for the menu and the window list.

Backdrops

You can start the Desktop settings dialog by clicking on the "Desktop" button in the Xfce Settings Manager.

Figure 1. Backdrop Settings

Shows backdrop settings dialog.
Color

This dialog allows you to select a color style for your desktop backdrop: solid color, horizontal gradient or vertical gradient. Depending on your choice, you will be able to choose one or two colors, using "First Color" and "Second Color" buttons. These buttons open a color chooser dialog:

Figure 2. Select backdrop color

Shows the Select backdrop color dialog

 

  • You can use the colored ring with a triangle inside: select the color you want from the outer ring, then select the darkness or lightness of that color using the inner triangle. Corresponding values of brightness, deepness, and amount of red, green and blue light in the color appear through the entries on the right side of the window.
  • You can click the eyedropper, then click anywhere on your screen to select the color.
  • You can enter an HTML-style hexadecimal color value, or simply a color name, in the "Color Name" entry.

The selected colors will fill the entire root window, and will remain visible through a transparent backdrop image.

Image

Unselect the "Show Image" option if you want xfdesktop to ignore the backdrop image and only use the previously selected colors.

The "File" entry shows the path to the currently selected backdrop image. If you want to change it, just drop and image on the path field, or edit the path, or click the browse button, and a classic file-browsing dialog will appear.

You can create a list of backdrop images that will be randomly used at startup. Click the "New list" button to open the list editing dialog:

Figure 3. Backdrop List

Shows backdrop list manager.

You may want to change the default path and name of your custom list of backdrops in the "List file" entry.

You can easily add an image file by clicking the "plus" button. That action will open a file-browsing window. You can remove a file, if you select it in the list and click the "minus" button. When your list is complete, click the "Save" button to save it. If you want to modify its content later, use the "Edit list" button of the Backdrop settings manager.

You can recover an older list by dropping its name.list file on the backdrop settings dialog from a file manager.

To refresh the backdrop with a new random image from the list just run the xfdesktop command again, e.g. from a terminal or the run dialog, or xfdesktop [-reload].

Four Style options (Tiled, Scaled, Centered and Stretched) are available to specify the fitting of the backdrop image on the screen, depending on its size. You can also select the "Auto" item if you want to let xfdesktop take care of this setting.

The slider at the bottom of the dialog allows you to adjust the brightness of the backdrop image and/or color.

xfdesktop supports xinerama and multiscreen modes. In multiscreen mode, the "Backdrops" dialog shows one tab per screen.

xfdesktop root menu

xfdesktop provides an applications menu and a windowlist menu that appear when you click on the desktop with your right or middle mouse button.

The Menu tab of the Desktop settings dialog allows you to configure the menu behaviour.

Figure 4. Menu tab

Shows the menu tab of the Desktop settings dialog.

If you want to use the root menu and/or the window list, the corresponding options have to be selected in the settings dialog.

A right-click on the desktop backdrop opens a menu that allows you to start some applications. Its configuration file, menu.xml, can be found under the path $sysconfdir/xdg/xfce4/menu.xml. For binary packages, $sysconfdir is often /etc and for source compiles, it defaults to /usr/local/etc.

While it is possible to edit the file manually, the recommended method for editing the menu.xml file is via the Xfce 4 Menu Editor, which can be started by running xfce4-menueditor, or using the "Edit desktop menu" button available from the Menu tab of the Desktop settings dialog. The menu editor also supports drag'n'drop from a file manager.

If you've edited the menu via xfce4-menueditor, the user-customized menu file will be saved to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/xfce4/desktop/menu.xml. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME usually defaults to ~/.config. If editing the file manually, copying it to this location first is the preferred method.

Figure 5. xfdesktop menu editor

Shows xfdesktop menu editor.

NOTE: If you choose to edit the file manually, menu.xml has to be in UTF-8 encoding for the toolkit to be able to display accented or other non-ASCII characters. Therefore, you need an editor that supports UTF-8, like gedit.

Figure 6. xfdesktop right-click mouse menu

Shows xfdesktop right-click mouse menu.

A middle-click on the desktop backdrop shows a list of all opened windows ordered by workspace. It also allows you to add or remove a workspace.

Figure 7. xfdesktop middle-click mouse menu

Shows xfdesktop middle-click mouse menu.

In order to lower the hardware requirements to run xfdesktop, you can disable the usage of icons in the desktop menu and the window list menu from the settings dialog.

You can open the menu or window list from the commandline as well. This can be useful for keyboard shortcuts. To open the menu run the command xfdesktop -menu, and for the windowlist use xfdesktop -windowlist.

About xfdesktop

xfdesktop was written by Brian Tarricone () and Jasper Huijsmans (), Benedikt Meurer (). For more information, please visit the Xfce website.

To report a bug or make a suggestion regarding this application or this manual, use the bug tracking system at http://bugzilla.xfce.org/.

If you have questions about the use or installation of this package, please ask on the xfce mailing list. Development discussion takes place on the xfce4-dev mailing list.

This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.