# XFce 4 Desktop Manager

### Jasper Huijsmans

`<huysmans@users.sourceforge.net>`

### François Le Clainche

`<fleclainche@wanadoo.fr>`

This manual describes `xfdesktop` version 4.0.

Copyright © 2003 Jasper Huijsmans

Copyright © 2003 François Le Clainche

## Introduction

The `xfdesktop` application manages the desktop background. It sets a background image and/or color and it pops up a menu when you click on it with your right or middle mouse button. Along with the application, two settings dialogs are installed for use with the XFce 4 Settings Manager. These dialogs allow you to change the background image and color and manage the number of workspaces.

## Background

You can start the background properties dialog by clicking on the "Desktop: backdrop" button in the settings manager dialog.

Figure 1. Background Settings

Color

  Click the "Background color" button, and a new dialog will appear :

  Figure 2. Select background color

  This dialog allows you to choose a color for the desktop background. This color will fill the entire root window, and will remain visible through a transparent background image. There are several ways to do that:

  - 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

  Select the "Use color only" option if you want `xfdesktop` to ignore the backgroung image and only use the choosen color.

Image

  The "File" entry shows the path to the currently selected background 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 background 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 background images that will be randomly used at startup. Click the "New list" button to open the list editing dialog:

  Figure 3. Backdrop List

  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 Background settings manager.

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

  To refresh the background with a new random image from the list just run the `xfdesktop` command again, e.g. from a terminal or the run dialog.

## Workspaces

You can start the Workspace Settings manager by clicking on the "Desktop: workspaces" button in the settings manager dialog.

Figure 4. Workspace Settings

Workspaces

  This option allows you too choose the number of workspaces you want to use (between 1 and 32).

Worspace names

  This field shows the list of avaible workspaces. If you want to edit the name of one of them, click its number and a fill the entry of the dialog that will then appear. When it's done, click the "Apply" button, or just press the Enter key, to return to the list.

## `xfdesktop` root menu

`xfdesktop` provides a mouse menu that appears when you click on the desktop background with your right or middle mouse button.

A right-click on the desktop background 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`.

Currently the only way to change the menu is to edit the menu file manually. Hopefully, future versions of XFce 4 will provide a graphical menu editor. For now, you should copy the `menu.xml` file to `~/.xfce4/menu.xml` and edit that. It is not difficult; just have a good look at the file and the commented out examples. Being a little bit familiar with reading xml or html files will make it easier. Icons are currently not supported in the menu, so the icon field won't have any effect.

NOTE: The menu.xml file 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 5. `xfdesktop` right-click mouse menu

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

Figure 6. `xfdesktop` middle-click mouse menu

## About xfdesktop

`xfdesktop` was written by Jasper Huijsmans (`<huysmans@users.sourceforge.net>`), Olivier Fourdan (`<fourdan@xfce.org>`) and Biju Chacko (`<botsie@myrealbox.com>`). To find 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 bug tracking system at the XFce SourceForge project site. 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.