Desktop desires and questions

[Cameron Simpson]

On 18Feb2012 12:17, les <hlhowell at pacbell.net> wrote:
| 	I know that this has been discussed before, and I will go back and read
| more of that.  
| The need to click to get to the computer is annoying at its very best
| and a real vocabulary expander in normal use.  Every time I use one
| application and I want to access another I have to click 

I find click to focus extremely annoying too.

[...]
| 	I want to know where the documents and or utilities are that will let
| me do something to improve my working environment and get back to
| efficiency.  If you have useful information, please send it on.

It will, of course, cost you some time to change things around:-)

[...]
| With all that said, the basic needs as I see it are:

On X11 my preferred manager is FVWM. I'll list what it does (or can be
made to do) for me under the points below.

| 	1. a way to get a list type menu instead of icons

Do you mean for applications or files or other things? You can put most
things in menus (all keyboard driven, too, btw, if you like)
autogenerated.

My FVWM menus, aside from things like window manager ops and the usual
"basic" stuff include:

 - a menu for my named desktops (arbitrarily many, sensibly named when I want
   them, keyboard driven - a keystroke to popup the menu, often a single
   keystroke to choose and switch to the desktop).

 - parallel menu to push app windows to a specific desktop (and not
   follow them)

 - menu for every open terminal window; mine all have informative named
   courtesy of the shell prompts etc, so this is more useful than one
   might think

 - of course you can make menus for your usual apps; I tend to invoke
   mine from the shell, but that is just me

| 	2. a way to move the icons (if a list is not possible) or listing to
| different top level applications menus.
| 	3.  Get the applications menu on screen all the time as a pulldown.

There is a general bottum module in FVWM; you can do (optionally
autohiding) top (or bottom etc) grids of buttons. For a toolbar (eg like
the mac menu system) you make this short and one, a single row of
buttons. Attach menus or actions etc to the buttons.

| 	4.  ability to change icons by right clicking on the current icon and
| selecting a "change icon" menu which will open a file navigator.

Dunno. I don't use file navigators. I believe there are a bunch of them
available.

| 	5. remove the "activities" switch and put the windows and applications
| buttons in its place with pull downs optional.
| 	6. remove the "favorites" and just let us put the icons on the desktop
| if we so desire.

I don't know if you can do this with Gnome (guessing your desktop
manager is Gnome at present); as I said, I use FVWM instead.

| 	7.  do whatever else can be done to allow font selection, including
| fontsize as well as icon size for the desktop.  This is an HID
| requirement anyway.

| 	8. Stop the messing around with the open desktop in any way whatsoever.
| It is distracting and interferes with efficiency.

I don't put stuff on the desktop itself much. An (somewhat dated) outline of my
setup is here:

  http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/fvwm/index.html

Switching window managers is a fair step, and you _will_ spend a lot of
time setting things up to your liking.

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

Speed costs money.  How fast do you want to go? - C. Shelby