xfdesktop
version 4.2.
Copyright © 2004 Jasper Huijsmans
Copyright © 2004 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 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.
You can start the Desktop settings dialog by clicking on the "Desktop" button in the Xfce Settings Manager.
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:
The selected colors will fill the entire root window, and will remain visible through a transparent backdrop 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:
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
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.
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.
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.
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
.
xfdesktop
was written by
Brian Tarricone (<kelnos@xfce.org>
) and
Jasper Huijsmans (<jasper@xfce.org>
),
Benedikt Meurer (<benny@xfce.org>
).
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.