xfdesktop
version 4.1.
Copyright © 2003 Jasper Huijsmans
Copyright © 2003 François Le Clainche
Copyright © 2004 Brian Tarricone
Table of Contents
The xfdesktop
application manages the desktop backdrop. It sets a
backdrop image and/or color and it can optionall pop up an applications
menu when you click on it with the right mouse button. It also displays a
window list of all running applications after a middle button clic.
Along with the application, a settings dialog is installed for use with the
Xfce 4 Settings Manager. This dialog allows you to
change the backdrop image and color. You can also request xfdesktop to
not set the backdrop, in order to allow another program to perform that
task.
You can start the backdrop properties dialog by clicking on the "Backdrop" button in the settings manager dialog.
Click the "Backdrop color" button, and a new dialog will appear :
This dialog allows you to choose a color for the desktop backdrop. This color will fill the entire root window, and will remain visible through a transparent backdrop image. There are several ways to do that:
Select the "Use color only" option if you want xfdesktop
to ignore
the backdrop image and only use the choosen color.
The "File" entry shows the path to the currently selected backdrop image. If you want to change it, just drop and image on the dialog from a file manager, or edit the path, or click the "Browse" button, and a classic file-browsing dialog will appear.
Three Style options (Tiled, Scaled, and Centered) can be used to
specify the fitting of the backdrop image on the screen, depending
on its size. You can also select the "Automatic" item if you want to
let xfdesktop
take care of this setting.
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:
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].
There are many programs that can set the backdrop image. If you prefer to use one of those programs, you can check this option and xfdesktop will refrain from setting the backdrop.
xfdesktop
provides a mouse menu that appears when you click on the
desktop backdrop with your right or middle mouse button.
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/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
found by running xfce4-menueditor
. The menu
editor also supports drag'n'drop from the file manager.
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
.
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.
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
.
xfdesktop
was written by Jasper Huijsmans
(<huysmans@users.sourceforge.net>
), Olivier Fourdan
(<fourdan@xfce.org>
), Biju Chacko
(<botsie@myrealbox.com>
), and Brian Tarricone
(<kelnos@xfce.org>
).
For more information, please visit the
Xfce web site.
To report a bug or make a suggestion regarding this application or this manual, send an email to the xfce4-dev mailing list — this is the preferred method — or use the Xfce's bug tracking system. If you have questions about the use or installation of this package, please ask on the xfce 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.