The XFce project was first started because I needed a simple, light and efficient environment for my Linux System.

There are now a lot of good environments and interfaces for Unix based systems, but most are too heavy, or too expensive, or even both !

I wanted something easy to use and configure, stable, fast, and, at last but not least, visually appealing...

I believe that the desktop environment should be made to increase user productivity. Therefore, the goal is keep most system resources for the applications, and not to consume all memory and CPU usage for what is used to display them.

From version to version, XFce became more and more user configurable. As XFce is made for the user, it has to be very simple to configure. That's why everything is driven by the mouse, using buttons, drag and drop, etc., and the configuration files are hidden from the user, although it is plain text.

User Guide

The main panel

The main functionalities of the main panel are :
 

• Launch applications
• Open popup menus
• Switch virtual desktop
• Give access to the configuration of the desktop

The clock as no special function, except showing the date as a tooltip, while the icons are used to launch applications.  You can select the analog or digital clock by clicking with the left mouse button on the clock.
 
 

To modify an icon on the main panel, or associate a command to an icon, click on the corresponding icon with the right mouse button.

To change the label of a virtual screen button, click on the button using the right mouse button :

Note : The number of virtual desktops is user configurable, from 2 to 10 desktops. See the configuration section, later in this manual, for more details.

On top of each icon, there is a little tiny arrow. Each of these buttons opens a popup menu.

Note : Some text based applications, such as "vi" require a terminal (xterm) to be opened. You can use the keyword "term" to start a terminal before running the command

e.g.:

Command line : term vi

Popup menus

Popup menus are another way of launching applications from XFce panel.

Each entry is associated to an application that is launched when the menu entry is selected.

Drag and drop from various file managers (XFTree included, of course) is supported. For example, you can drag a C source file onto the X-Edit entry, and xedit will be started and open the file specified.

The item on the top of the menu, called "Add icon..." is used to add new entries to menu. Drag and drop is also supported, but it does not trigger the same action. In fact, when you drop a file (an executable, preferably) and entry is automatically added to the corresponding menu, with a default icon. Obviously, you can later change this icon by using the left mouse button.

The little tiny button on the top of the menu is only visible if the option "Use tear-off menu" is enabled. By clicking on this button, you can "detach" the menu. Once a menu is detached, you can move it around your screen and it stays opened even if an entry is selected, which is very convenient.

An existing entry can be modified by using the right mouse button :

Setup & parameters

As stated before, XFce is very intuitive. All customization can be performed through its graphical user interface.

For this purpose, XFce provides a setup dialog, with 4 tabfolders : "Palette", "XFce", "Windows" and "Startup".

Palette tabfolder

As XFce is based on the popular GTK+ toolkit, it uses the gtkrc (style configuration hidden file located in user's directory) to share with all GTK+ applications the same color scheme. But while gtkrc is usually copied from a theme or written by hand, XFce is able to automatically generate the gtkrc file from the color values and font selected by the user in the palette setup screen.

XFce is able to determine whether the gtkrc file is customized by the user or not. If one wants to build his own gtkrc style, or else if one uses a style from GNOME Control Center (gnomecc), XFce won't override it (as a result, if you curently have a .gtkrc file in your home directory and you want XFce to manage the style for you, you should remove or rename your current ~/.gtkrc file).

But if there is no .gtkrc file in user's home directory or if it is empty, XFce will generate a .gtkrc file so all GTK+ applications, including GNOME applications will share exactly the same look.

A palette, from XFce's point of view is made of 8 colors and a font name. Each colors is used to display specific items in XFce desktop, like the mouse pointer, the default window background, the text fields, etc.

The color you select for this palette are shared by all XFce aware applications (XFTree, XFClock, XFwm, etc.)

By clicking on one of the colors, you can change it using the color selector :

The palette can be saved to disk using the "Save..." button. You can retrieve it later using the "Load..." button.

You don't necessarily need to save your palette to disk unless you want to share it with other users. The current palette is automatically saved to a file in user's home directory so that XFce will have the same color scheme when you restart it.

The font used for displaying text in XFce is selected in the XFce tabfolder.

XFce tabfolder

This dialog gives access to all XFce options :
 

• Set the delay before tooltips appear.
• Let XFce repaint the root window with the color of the screen button.
• Use a gradient instead of plain color (only available if previous option is selected. This option has no effect on terminals with less that 256 colors, to reduce color usage)
• Use tear-off menus (see popup menus, earlier in this manual)
• The number of virtual screens available in XFce panel. From 2 to 10 screens are available.
• The number of popup menus : You can choose to have from 0, up to 12 popup menus in XFce panel !
• The size if icons displayed on the panel. If your pixmap are larger than the values specified, the images are automatically scaled to fit the button.
• The size of the icons in the popup menus. Same as above.
• The font used in XFce applications (as for the palette, this font is shared by all XFce applications)

Notes :

1. The option "repaint root window" overrides any other application trying to use the root window. As a result, if you specify a backdrop in xfbd, XFce's backdrop manager, make sure you disable this option.

2. By changing the size of the icons, along with the number of popup menus available in XFce panel, you can adapt XFce to all types of screens, including small screens.

Windows tabfolder

This tabfolder is for managing XFwm, the window manager, options.

The behavior of the windows can be tuned by using the following options :
 

• Click to focus windows : If you enable this option, you will have to click inside a window to give it the keyboard focus. Otherwise, the keyboard focus will be given to the window below the mouse pointer. If you move the pointer, the focus moves accordingly.
• When Autoraise window is enabled (this option is not available if "Click to focus" is enabled) the windows with keyboard focus are automatically raised, i.e. placed on top of all other windows.
• Show contents of windows during move/resize defines whether the whole window or just an outline shadow should be shown during move/resize operations. The outline shadow (ie if this option is not selected) gives additional informations about the window position and geometry. Please note that opaque move and resize can load your system or your network if using Xfce on a remote X terminal,  by causing a lot of window exposure events.
• Set the size of the snap grid for windows. Windows snapping is a very convenient feature : When a window is moved such that it touches another window or the screen edge it holds that position for a moment. Using this feature, you can align windows quite easily by just moving them till they hold then releasing them.

"Snapsize" option also drives the autodesk switch feature. By setting a snapsize lower or equal to 5, the autodesk switch will be disabled.
• The title bar of active window can be painted using a solid or a gradient color. Just select "Use gradient color for active window" to use a gradient color.
• "Use gradient color for inactive windows" is similar for inactive windows. Please note that these options have no effect on terminals with 256 colors or less.
• XFwm automatically arrange the iconified windows on the screen. You can specify where to place the icons by selecting top, left, bottom or right.
• The 3 last fields are for changing the fonts used by the window manager :

1. Font used for titles.
2. Font used for menus.
3. Font used for icons.

Startup tabfolder

Using the options from this screen, you can adjust which XFce core modules (daemons/services) you want to start when XFce starts.

For example, if you don't want the pager to be launched on startup, just unselect the option. Beware that if a module is not started, the corresponding feature won't be enabled : If you don't start xfsound, you won't get any sound in XFce.

The Window Manager

XFwm is the window manager that comes with XFce.

It is fully integrated to the environment, providing a homogeneous interface with all XFce applications.

Moreover, XFwm is able to handle the most common window hints shared by popular applications such as Motif Applications and SUN Openwindows applications, but also with KDE and GNOME applications.

Most user options are handled through XFce setup, and do not require any script customization (although you'll find a description of XFwm functions in the technical documentation of XFce)

Without any specific customization, XFwm provides a set of built-in menus and functions.

Main menu

The main menu can be obtained by clicking on the root window with the right mouse button, or by pressing [Alt+F2]

This menu provides an access to the most common operations.
 

• New window : Opens an xterm
• Shuffle Up : Moves focus to the next window (but does not raise it)
• Shuffle Down : Moves focus to the previous window (does not raise it either)
• Refresh : Force a repaint of all mapped windows.
• Arrange Icons : Arrange icons on the current desktop, according to the position selected in XFce options (i.e. top, left, right, bottom)
• Mouse : Opens XFMouse, the mouse configuration utility
• Backdrop : Opens XFbd, the backdrop selector.
• Sound : Opens XFSound, XFce sound configurator.
• Quit XFwm : Opens a sub-menu, for restarting the window manager (and its modules such as XFPager or XFce panel) or quit.

Window Menu

The window menu can be obtained by clicking on the root window with the middle mouse button (or both left and right button, if you have only 2 mouse buttons) or by pressing [Alt+F1]

• Move : Move the window around the screen. If no window is selected, you'll be prompted to selected a window first.
• Resize : Change the size of a window
•  Iconify/Deiconify : Hide the window and display a little icon in place.
• Stick/Unstick : When a window is "sticky", it stays on the screen even if you switch to another desktop. Otherwise, only the windows of the corresponding desktop are displayed.
• Shade/Unshade : pull up the window and display just the title bar.
• Maximize/Unmaximize : Enlarge the window so it occupies all screen.
• Close : Close the window. If it is the main window of an application, the corresponding application is terminated. When an application is overloaded, it can refuse to respond this event.
• Send to : Send the window to another workspace

• Switch to : Display a list of running applications, and let you choose which one to focus

Keyboard shortcuts
 

Mouse bindings

The file Manager, XFTree

XFTree is a very simple file manager, which provides a graphical user interface to most common file operations.

XFTree supports drag and drop to itself, other GTK+ applications and, of course, the XFce panel.

Usage

Starting xftree will use the home directory as the default root if no directory is given as argument.

• Right mouse button: popup a context menu (which depends on selected items).

• Left mouse button: select an item; [SHIFT] allow selection of multiple items and [CTRL] will add/remove items to the selection.
• Middle mouse button: convenient for drag and drop operations, since the selection will not be changed.
• Double-click: start the selected application or if the item is a regular file, start the registered program and pass the file name as argument.
• Alt+Double-click: same as above but start a terminal before executing user command. If selected item is a directory, change the root of the tree to that directory.

Drag and Drop: by default, drag and drop copy the items. If [SHIFT] is pressed during drag, items are moved instead of copied. Drag and drop of URL is allowed, e.g. from mozilla, as long as CURL is available. The corresponding file will be downloaded.

Keyboard shortcuts
 

Other XFce tools

XFMouse

XFMouse is the mouse configurator. Thanks to XFMouse, you can change the mouse button mapping and other parameters

• Select Left or Right if you are left or right handed. If you select "Left", logical button 1 will be mapped on physical button 3 and logical button 3 will be mapped on physical button 1. Button 2 (middle) is kept unchanged. Note that this setting is global to the X server and will affect all applications running on the screen.
• "Acceleration" determine how many pixels to move the cursor based on how much the physical pointer moved.
• "Threshold" specifies how many pixels the physical pointer must have to move for "acceleration" to take effect.

XFSound

XFSound is in charge of emitting a sound whenever a event occurs from the window manager. It is started automatically as a "module" at start-up.

When XFSound is started as a module (i.e. from XFce or XFwm using the keyword "Module"), it just enters a loop that keeps on listening to the events coming from the Window Manager (XFwm)

Whenever a event occurs, XFSound will execute the user specified command intended to play actually the sound with the sound file corresponding to the event itself.

The user can interact with XFSound using the graphical interface by starting XFSound as a regular X application (i.e. not as a module).

XFPager

XFPager is a small tool that provides a miniature view of all XFwm desktops.

XFPager must be started as a module (i.e. from xfce panel or xfwm using the keyword "Module") to initiate the communication pipe with xfwm.

XFPager is able to receive and send events to windows running on each XFwm desktop. If you move a window on the screen, its image will be moved in XFPager, and if you move a window in the pager, the windows will be moved on the screen accordingly.

By default, XFPager will manage the default 10 screens of XFce, but it can also manage up to 32 screens !

XFbd

XFbd is a backdrop manager that displays image files on the root window, as a wallpaper (if XFce has been linked against IMLIB at compilation time, xfbd is able to use almost any kind of existing image format, ie png, gif, jpeg, bmp,tiff, etc. and scale them to fit the screen)

Please note that the use of xfbd avoids the use of the option "Repaint root window of workspace" in XFce setup screen and vice versa (both use the same root window...).

xfgnome

xfgnome is a module used for GNOME compatibility. If started, xfwm acts like a "GNOME compliant Window manager" and allow the use of GNOME applets such as GNOME pager. xfgnome module appeared in XFce 3.2.0

xfterm

xfterm is a small wrapper to be used as drag and drop action for the XFce/XFTree front panel.

The environment variableTERMCMD sets the 'terminal' command  to  be  used.  Usually'xterm'.  The  terminal  emulation should support the "-e" option for executing commands

For example, to use rxvt as default terminal, add the following line to your $HOME/.xinitrc file prior to starting xfwm :

export TERMCMD=rxvt

Technical Documentation

Compilation

XFce 3.2 uses GNU autoconf and GNU automake to generate the makefiles.

As a result, configuration can be performed as simply as typing ./configuration in XFce source directory !

Among all configuration options, you might be concerned with the following ones :

--prefix=<directory>

Specify the base directory where files will be installed (except XFce data)

--datadir=<directory>

Specify the directory where the data will be installed. The default is /usr/local/share. The data will be installed in <datadir>/xfce/

--enable-nls/--disable-nls

enable/disable Native Language Support

--enable-dt/--disable-dt

enable/disable additional CDE configuration files. On systems using CDE, you can install additional configuration files that will provide an entry for XFce in dtlogin screen.

Once the configuration is over, run make and make install.

On Linux system, you might want to reduce the size of executables by doing a make install-strip.

This will discards all symbols from the program files (for example, xfce is 10 times smaller without the symbols)

Installation

XFce provides 2 convenient scripts for easy installation/configuration of XFce.

Run xfce_setup to set up replacement files in user's home directory. These files will fire up xfwm and xfce every time the user starts an X session (through startx or through xdm)

The previous configurations files are saved in a hidden directory .xfce_bckp/

Afterwards, one can use xfce_remove to restore the previous files.

The directory specified at configuration time for the data can be overridden afterwards by setting the environment variable XFCE_DATA to another directory.

E.g.

bash : export XFCE_DATA=/usr/local/share

csh : setenv XFCE_DATA /usr/local/share

As XFce supports Native Language Supports (NLS), make sure the environment variable LANG is correctly set for your country.

E.g.:

bash : export LANG="fr"

csh : setenv LANG "fr"

XFwm commands
 

Note : (*) denotes parameters overridden by XFce at start-up.

Advanced configuration options for xfwm

Some options such as keyboard shortcuts or user defined menus can be tweaked using .xfwmrc configuration file.

Preparing the configuration file

The first step is to copy the sample configuration file to your home directory :

cp /usr/share/xfce/sample.xfwmrc $HOME/.xfwmrc

Adding new entries/submenus to the root menu

If you wish to add new entries to the existing root menu, add the following lines to tour $HOME/.xfwmrc file :

Removing existing keyboard shortcuts

Some applications require specific keyboard shortcust, that can interfere with xfwm shortcuts.

To remove the default existing keyboard shortcuts defined in xfwm, add the following lines to your $HOME/.xfwmrc :

Recognized contexts :

• R for the root window,
• W for an application window
• T for a window title bar
• S for a window side, top, or bottom bar,
• F for a window frame (the corners),
• I for  an  Icon window
• A  is  for  any context except for title-bar buttons

• S is for Shift
• M is for Meta
• C for Control
• N is for no modifier

for example, IW is for Icon and Window, N is for no modifier pressed during operation.

Copyright (C) 1999 Olivier Fourdan (fourdan@xfce.org)

- xfce, xfclock, xfbd, xfmouse & xfsound are written by :

Olivier Fourdan (fourdan@xfce.org)

- XFTree is based on xtree from :

Rasca Gmelch <thron@gmx.de>

- xfwm and xfpager are based on fvwm and fvwm2 from :

Robert Nation Charles Hines

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it 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.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

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Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

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How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs

If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.

To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.

<one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.>

Copyright (C) <year> <name of author>

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it 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.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

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

Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.

If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:

Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) year name of author Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.

The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, the commands you use may be called something other than `show w' and `show c'; they could even be mouse-clicks or menu items--whatever suits your program.

You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:

Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program `Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker.

<signature of Ty Coon>, 1 April 1989 Ty Coon, President of Vice

This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public License instead of this License.