I would just like to highlight some recent tricks and tips in xfce that I think are really cool, and worth knowing about:
- You can use the middle mouse button to bring any window into focus, regardless of what workspace its on.
- If there are two or more windows on top of each other, say maximized, then middle-clicking the title bar cycles them into focus.
- 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.
- 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.
- You can right click on the desktop to bring up the applications menu
- 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 :)
- 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
- 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.
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.
ReplyDeleteHowever, 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.