Minor U.I. suggestions for future antiX versions

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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These settings do indeed move the current active window; not my personal “thing”,
but they work as advertised. ( I just verified this).

#  Let the active window occupy 1/4 of the screen.
KeyWinTileTopLeft="Super+KP_Home"
KeyWinTileTopRight="Super+KP_Prior"
KeyWinTileBottomLeft="Super+KP_End"
KeyWinTileBottomRight="Super+KP_Next"

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Yes – confirmed that:
ShowMoveSizeStatus=0 will prevent the window geometry from showing and
ShowMoveSizeStatus=1 will display the window geometry when a window is moved.

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Brian Masinick

[Member PPC]

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blur13 wrote:

maybe you should write an ICEWM FAQ

I did one better – I created IceWM Control Centre – almost any setting anyone can think of changing is there, usually in a “toggle” button…
But you are right, I’ll probably add some IceWM tips in the Unofficial FAQ’s (they are meant mostly for users of antiX Full, that use the default desktop).

On more feature, that I forgot how to set it the one used by default in antiX 21/22, but not in 23- show a large popup icon when users hover the pointer above the toolbar quick launchers – it’s a great feature for people with bad eye sight, and I think it just got left out by mistake – Xunzi, I think you told once how to set it back on, but I don’t remember how to do it (it has something to do with icon size, somewhere in the huge prefereces file)

I do not intend to keep adding more and more suggestions about IceWM default settings here – but I think the one about having the app’s icon on the title bar should be used, and magnifying quick launch icons does makes sense… and it’s the default setting on most OSes.

P.

[Member PPC]

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I don’t have than many suggestions left, but I just thought about this one: a .desktop file to launch bluethooth’s system tray icon – it doesn’t even require much localization: “name=Bluetooth”, it’s a one size fits all.. And not onlu makes it easy for users to launch BT, but also to at it to the startup file, using the provided GUIs for that effect…

[Member blur13]

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There should be a thread where ppl can post their favorite icewm tweaks. I think these are quite essential:

MenuMouseTracking=1

# Treat Super/Win modifier as Ctrl+Alt
ModSuperIsCtrlAlt=0

# Raise a selected window while Alt+Tabbing in the QuickSwitch.
QuickSwitchRaiseCandidate=1

Also, if you have two keyboard layouts and switch between them using alt+shift (as I have been doing since the beginning of my windows days), then that keyboard shortcut hijacks all icewm keyboard shortcuts beginning with alt+shift. So quite a few keyboard shortcuts have to be redefined, for instance the “move window to workspace x” shortcuts, so for these I have:

KeySysWorkspace1TakeWin=”Ctrl+Super+1″

etc.

I think the default “keys” file provided by BobC is quite good. At least its a good starting point. But it would also be interesting to see how other ppl have optimized their keyboard driven shortcuts.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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There is an entire section devoted to “Tips and Tricks“; it’s in the General category.
You can readily see these from the Main menu (in other words, when you directly enter the site https://www.antixforum.com/ )

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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By the way, four of the five currently pinned topics are in Tips and Tricks

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Brian Masinick

[Member PPC]

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This one is not a “minor UI suggestion” – I already did a merge request in antiX’s gitlab, proposing the addition of a new “yad-goodie” – antiX-cloud – a slightly improved version of the GUI script that is included in FT10, redone to allow users to automatically configure and access what are very probably the 2 biggest Cloud services- Google Drive and OneDrive (and using rclone’s cli interface, manually configure any other cloud service). The script is only about 10Kb + it’s .desktop file (but requires localization, eventually, because it’s English only).
When run for the first time, the script (just like the script to connect to Samba networks, that antiX 23 now includes) asks the user for permission to download rclone (it takes about 60MB of disk space). When rclone is installed, if no cloud drives are setup, a simple GUI pops up, allowing the user to setup either Google Drive, OneDrive, or manually configure any other cloud drive (clicking the “gears” icon on the main window always summons that “configuration screen”).
If a cloud drive is already setup, running the script opens a main window, listing the configured cloud drive(s). Double clicking the desired cloud drive mounts it and opens it in the default file manager, just like it was a normal drive (but a lot slower).
Users can open documents and edit them on LibreOffice, and save them directly to the cloud (I tested that on OneDrive). This may be handy if you are working with non-confidential files (after all the “cloud” is just a company server, storing your files, that can by accessed by other persons), across several devices (ex: home computer and laptop at school, etc, etc).
There are much better ways to share files… but lets face it, almost everyone connected to the internet uses, in one form or another, cloud services… This GUI simply allows users to add that extra functionality, out of the box, to antiX (costing about 12kb of disk space, about 60 Mb after rclone is installed)… no need to do anything more than clicking a couple of buttons or so…
Some may say this is bloating antiX, or supporting the use of Cloud storage… I think it’s just adding a feature probably most people will like and use.

One very nice use for this can be, for example- backing up your dot files to the internet, so you can retrieve them from any computer…

EDIT: I’m glad to report that anticapitalista accepted this suggestion.

P.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by PPC.

[Member blur13]

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@PPC

Do you have any estimate of the resource usage of having rclone running?

Dropbox uses about 300 MiB and uses marginal CPU resources when running as a daemon. Just trying to compare the two solutions.

I guess the best way for both solutions is to connect to the service to sync, then disconnect, and only connect again when there are files that need to be synced, to avoid the overhead of having a program constantly running in the background.

[Member PPC]

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@blur13:

After closing Firefor-esr:

– having only ZzzFM + Lxtaskmanager running, Lxtaskmanager reported: 224-225Mb of RAM being used
– having ZzzFM accessing Google Drive + Lxtaskmanager + antix-cloud’s system tray icon running (fully optional, can be turned off from the GUI): ~277MB of RAM being used

P.

Edit: “Dropbox” is available under rclone, it’s entry nr 13… But I have no account to test it with. If you test the script and can improve it to also automatically configure Dropbox, it would be ideal…

Edit2: having a yad toolbar icon on the taskbar (like the script does) uses about 12 or so Mb of RAM, that you can save, when you disable it, so having a drive mounted by rclone really should use about 40Mb of RAM an negligible CPU use.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by PPC.
• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by PPC.
• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by PPC.

[Member Xunzi_23]

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As PPC noted the config for ICEWM is big and very useful. Well worth some time investigating the workings,
reading ICEWM Manual and occasionally visiting https://ice-wm.org/FAQ/

Tool Tip Icons, credit to BobC please, some users find the popups very useful, that applies especially to new users
who need time to recognise what is behind some of the less intuitive icons.

# Delay in ms before tooltip window is displayed. ######### TOOL TIP DELAY
# ToolTipDelay=500 # [0-5000]

# Show an application icon in toolbar and tray tooltips. ######### TOOL TIP ICON ON OFF
ToolTipIcon=0 # 0/1

Main window arrange keys
KeyWinArrangeN=”Alt+Ctrl+KP_Up” # Up-Move window Top
KeyWinArrangeNE=”Alt+Ctrl+KP_Prior” # PgUp-Move window Top Right
KeyWinArrangeE=”Alt+Ctrl+KP_Right” # Right-Move window to Right
KeyWinArrangeSE=”Alt+Ctrl+KP_Next” # PgDn-Move window to Bottom Right
KeyWinArrangeS=”Alt+Ctrl+KP_Down” # Down-Move window to Bottom
KeyWinArrangeSW=”Alt+Ctrl+KP_End” # End-Move window to Bottom Left
KeyWinArrangeW=”Alt+Ctrl+KP_Left” # Left-Move window to Left
KeyWinArrangeNW=”Alt+Ctrl+KP_Home” # Home-Move window to Top Left
KeyWinArrangeC=”Alt+Ctrl+KP_Begin” # 5-Center window

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Xunzi_23.

[Member PPC]

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@Xunzi_23 – many thanks for reminding me the correct setting to have large icons on the toolbar tooltips (for quicklaunchers)

So I update my suggestion: in order for antiX 23 to have that feature that was on be default in antiX 22, icewm’s “preferecences” file should have this line (be default it should be line 449), uncommented and set to 1:
ToolTipIcon=1

@Xunzi_23 – can you make that change in antiX’s Gitlab? It’s over at https://gitlab.com/antiX-Linux/desktop-defaults-icewm/-/blob/master/skel/.icewm/preferences
I can’t, because I can’t sync my version of that project… I kind of managed to find a long way of doing that… lets way and see if anticapitalista agrees with that proposed change (well, not really a change, it’s more restoring what was once the a default setting).

P.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by PPC.

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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@PPC – antiX-cloud needs to do an apt update just in case user hasn’t done one before running the script.

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Member PPC]

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@anticapitalista – nice catch! I never thought about that possibility happening. I attach the updated file, that always runs “apt update” before trying to install rclone. Can you please send it to antiX’s Git and use it instead or the original?

P.

EDIT: I could have “beautified” the terminal that the script runs to perform the installation, à lá antiX Updated, but I think this detail is not really needed, since most users will probably just run this once…

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by PPC.
• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by PPC.

Attachments:

1. antix-cloud-patched-to-run-apt-update.tar

[Member PPC]

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The ammount of scripts and configurations that I do on antiX 23 will probably slow down to, so I just wanted to let you guys some news about the suggestions I made here on this thread:

– I already commited changes to IceWM’s preferences and keys files, so only one instance of the Task Manager and of the Exit menucan be started from the GUI, and also, when using the default shortcut keys, only one instance of app-select is run at a time.
– The calendar that pops up when you click the clock, on IceWM’s toolbar should also be upgraded to let users insert all day events very soon (that commit was already accepted). Users probably will only notice any difference if thy click any day on the calendar…
– I commited to enable switchkey “Super+p” icewm-menu-xrandr by default
– In IceWM’s preferences files over at gitlab, “ToolTipIcon=1” is now set as default, like it was for older antiX versions
– antix Cloud is now a part of antiX (so, if users require access to the cloud, they can easily install rclone and set that up, if they don’t the script just uses some kb of disk space and no system resources at all, if it’s not being run)
– I also commited a script, and it’s multilingual .desktop file, so users can enable/disable permantenly fbxkb, the keyboad language flag that is displayed on the system tray (most users require just one keyboard layout, so fbxkb just sits there, wasting RAM).

TO DO’s:
– Changing the default bashrc (I have no idea where it is on anticapitalista’s gitlab) so only one instance of volumeicon and fbxkb (that makes the OS look unpolished, and also can use system resources for no reason at all)
– To allow only one instance of app-select to be run from the menu would imply manually editing more than 100 IceWM “menu” config files (there are 4 for each supported language)…
– add IceWM Control Centre to IceWM’s desktop icons (no idea where to do that on gitlab)
– in IceWM, have, by default the $HOME/.icewm/themes folder created out of the box (no idea where to do that on gitlab)
– I’ll probably try changing the conky toggle script, so the change is permanent (folks that don’t like/need conky have to turn it off every time they reboot, or edit the desktop-session startup file – and most people don’t like doing that, me included)

At least I achieved my most relevant suggestions (the multiple app-select windows opened from the menu are still getting into my nerves… all the rest are really tiny details (I guess it means antiX UI and UX is getting really really good, when I just worry about tiny details).

P.

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