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XFCE 4.18

alexxcons.github.io

111–120 of 145 posts

Re: XFCE 4.18

#111
post #19
post #3

Awesome. Been using XFCE for ages. It hits just the right spot of modern features and usability without trying to re-invent the desktop paradigm for the Nth time. If you just want "Win98, but in 2022," you've found your desktop environment. WRT this update, the Thunar updates look fantastic. The File Highlight feature looks especially cool. I can imagine using that to highlight really frequently used folders in my ho…

As an enthusiastic XFCE user, do you mind answering a question? How do you usually launch applications? I can appreciate the discoverability provided by a nested start menu but I've grown very fond of text launchers with autocomplete provided by gnome, mac os, dmenu, etc.

I know my desktop is a mess but I usually have one window with many terminals open.

So if I want to start a program without going through the menu Alt Tab to the terminal window, then I start it from the commandline (gimp, code, blender, godot, etc.)

Re: XFCE 4.18

#112

I've used XFCE seemingly forever, at least 20 years. In recent years I've grown to dislike Thunar and a variety of other things that were mostly GTK issues and some XFCE issues. I was really frustrated with clicking on the system tray and having that click register as a click on the menu that popped up, that just so happened to be 'Quit', and closing the app. Then I upgraded my computer in a huge jump. Sure, games we…

> I love the polish of KDE

this is really funny, because to me, KDE starting from ~4 is the gaudiest thing I've seen.

Re: XFCE 4.18

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the reason it's broken, is that it doesn't do all the annoying things that make the file picker in Windows 98 broken? Granted I've never used Windows 98 so I don't know what I'd compare it with but all those misfeatures sound annoying.

I think you've read me wrongly. All that I described above are problems in the GTK3 file picker that aren't problems in the Windows 98 file picker. See the linked web page for a screenshot of the W98 picker for a visual aid.

Yes, the Windows 98 one is broken.

Re: XFCE 4.18

#114
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's what I did back when I used XFCE a couple of years ago: The xfce whiskermenu plugin includes a text search feature that looks similar to the one from Windows. On Xubuntu the whiskermenu is the default "start menu" while in some other distros you may need to add it in the panel settings. Finally, in the keyboard shortcuts bind Super to the xfce4-popup-whiskermenu command, to bring up whisker menu for a text sea…

> Finally, in the keyboard shortcuts bind Super to the xfce4-popup-whiskermenu command, to bring up whisker menu for a text search. I've had this trigger the popup menu when there is another shortcut that binds the Super key in combination with something else. Say, if I had something under Super+R, then the menu would also open. Though maybe this has been patched out in the newer versions, I remember that issue being…

I worked around this issue using xcape to map my Super key to another key combo:

  xcape -e "Super_L=Alt_L|F1"
Then set the keyboard shortcut for xfce4-popup-whiskermenu to the new combo (Alt+F1 in this case). This allows other Super shortcuts to work without triggering whiskermenu.

Re: XFCE 4.18

#115
> Custom Actions

> It is now possible to arrange custom actions in cascading submenus. Just enter the same submenu name for a custom action in order to place it into the same menu. If you require multiple menu levels, you can achieve that by using `/` in the path of the 'Submenu' entry.

In 2012 KDE AppMenu Runner was presented as a "plugin which allows to browse, search and select the menubar of the active application".[0]

In 2019 I requested to somehow implement a feature, similar to Blender's "Menu Search"/"Operator Search"[1], into Olive Video Editor.[2]

After resulted0 "Action Search" was implemented into Olive Video Editor (`/`) shortcut, its code was reused for "Action Search" in Scribus (`Ctrl+/`) and then converted into Qt5-plugin.[3,4]

Year later, this Qt5-plugin code reused in for implementing global "Action Search" in helloSystem FreeBSD distribution.[5]

Then "Search and Run a Command" (`/`) was added into GIMP.[6]

Guess, GIMP's implementation may be used for other GTK-based apps too (especially Inkscape, which still has no such feature).

[0] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/02/appmenu-runner-the-kde-h...

[1] https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/interface/controls...

[2] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/issues/265

[3] https://github.com/scribusproject/scribus/issues/109

[4] https://github.com/aoloe/scribus-plugin-actionSearch

[5] https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/issues/21

[6] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/5601

Re: XFCE 4.18

#116
I love XFCE but it has some strange bug with custom keybindings that unfortunately spoils the experience for me. I have spent many hours trying to work around it but eventually gave up.

Re: XFCE 4.18

#117
> Thunar: It is now possible to add a 'file creation date' column

Finally! Coming from Windows this is something I've always missed.

I know older filesystems didn't support it but EXT4 has been the default for years now.

Re: XFCE 4.18

#118
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the compositor doing that. In XFCE, you can control that from the "Window Manager Tweaks" app, in the "compositor" tab.

It's not the compositor, sadly, this is a GTK "feature". GTK allows you to define colors for various elements separately, depending on whether the window has focus or not. This is a good idea on paper, but in practice it seems this either doesn't have enough granularity (to allow e.g. dimming button text, which is probably useless when the window doesn't have focus, but not the text in text views, for instance, which…

I see. I guess the only solution is to go on a theme hunt, then. I use Bunsen themes with XFCE, and haven't encountered that problem, but I don't use a lot of GTK3 apps.

Re: XFCE 4.18

#119
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It just gets out of my way and lets me do stuff! Ahh, but think of the value our users would get out of us presenting them with Amazon ads in their DE!

> Ahh, but think of the value our users would get out of us presenting them with Amazon ads in their DE What? Is this in regards to what Cannonical did back in 2013 or something else? If it is about the Cannonical scandal, I am not sure how that's related to DEs, since it was Ubuntu doing it Or did something similar happen again with a specific DE?

I remember in maybe 2011/2012, Ubuntu did have embedded ads in their Unity DE.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...

Re: XFCE 4.18

#120
post #63

You can combine XFCE with Gala window manager (from Elementary), it isn't perfect but it can look good.

Thank you for this information, I'm interested. Does Gala let you bind keyboard shortcuts for window moving/resizing actions? That's the main reason I'm still using OpenBox with XFCE.
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