Saturday, January 8, 2011

xfce tricks, tips and cool features

I love xfce.  In all fairness, I haven't used gnome for over a year, so I cannot really make a fair comparison to the newer versions.  But I would like to say some reasons I do love xfce...

I would just like to highlight some recent tricks and tips in xfce that I think are really cool, and worth knowing about:

  1. You can use the middle mouse button to bring any window into focus, regardless of what workspace its on.
  2. If there are two or more windows on top of each other, say maximized, then middle-clicking the title bar cycles them into focus.
  3. Dual monitor configuration works pretty well once you have X configured properly.  Sometimes you need to restart x for everything to work right the first time.  For example, you can move panels between monitors using the panels menu.
  4. If you want to duplicate a panel, so it shows up on two monitors, there's no  GUI way to do this.  But if you edit the config file ~/.config/xfce4/panel/panels.xml, you can simply copy one of the <panel>....</panel> entries and paste it somewhere else.  You should them change the screen-position or the monitor properties of one of them to move it (although strictly-speaking, this is probably optional).  Then 'pkill xfce4-panel' and restart it (best to hit Alt-F2, type "xfce4-panel" and hit enter).  If you changed the screen-position/monitor settings for your new panel you should see it immediately.  Otherwise you'll need to go to the xfce4->settings->Panel window, and you'll see there's a duplicate panel in the list that you can move around.
  5. You can right click on the desktop to bring up the applications menu
  6. Soon I'll be publishing a python script that takes a folder of scripts and turns it into a launcher with a menu on one of your panels... stay tuned :)
And some things I've known about for a while that I use all the time:

  1. You can configure windows to be partially transparent when you move them, so you can see all the windows behind as you're rearranging things
  2. You can set a window to 'always on top' or 'always on bottom'.  This often helps when you're forced to overlap windows, and you want to read from one while editing the other.  Typically I put the smaller window "on top" in such a way I can still see everything I need on the bottom one.

1 comment:

  1. After using Gnome 2 for many years, now I am using XFCE after moving to Debian Wheezy. I think it is such a great desktop.

    However, I needed to tweak it a little. I wrote a simple tutorial explaining the changes I did to adapt it to my own taste:

    http://cosmolinux.no-ip.org/raconetlinux2/xfce_wheezy.html

    I wish it is useful to someone else.

    ReplyDelete