This is the full transcription of podcast 'GNU World Order Linux Cast' - gnuWorldOrder_601.
#Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
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This is the full transcription of podcast 'GNU World Order Linux Cast' - gnuWorldOrder_601.
#Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
Let's go through every single package installed with a Linux install image. I'm going through the software included with Slackware, but these are all open source applications and libraries, so whether you're running Slackware like me or Fedora, Debian, BSD, or even Mac or Windows, you can probably download, install, and try these on your computer. So chances are you'll be able to learn something from this podcast. Let's get started. In this episode, I'm continuing the exploration of XFCE desktop environment. It's turning out to be even more interesting than I thought, honestly. The deeper I have delved into how the desktop works, the more admiration I am acquiring for this particular implementation. I'll get to exactly why in later episodes, I think, after we've seen even more of the components. One of the premiere components of XFCE is the Thunar file manager. There's one thing that's very famous about Thunar, or I say famous, I feel like it's famous. I feel like it's often referenced (1/54)
as kind of the feature that Thunar offers to the world, but I won't get to that immediately. First, Thunar. It is the file manager of XFCE, and a file manager, of course, is an application that shows you your files. That's all that is, whether you call it a Finder window, or a Windows Explorer window, or just a file manager, or Dolphin, or Nautilus, or Files, or Thunar. They're just applications. Because a lot of people get started with, like, GNOME, or Windows or Mac, where typically the only option you have to look at files is exactly the option that you're provided by that vendor or that project. I think a lot of us often feel like the file manager is kind of baked into the monitor, you know, your screen. That's the file manager you got with the whole package. You can change. You can have lots of other file managers. You don't have to just use one. You don't have to use the one that that desktop says you have to use. You can use Thunar with your Plasma desktop, or you could use (2/54)
Thunar on Fluxbox, or whatever. That's kind of empowering right there. Actually, honestly, when I discovered how many file managers there were for Linux, when I switched over to Linux, that was honestly one of the main appeals. Not because I needed more file managers. There are very few file managers that I use, and I think, oh my gosh, it just doesn't work the way I think it should work. They all kind of do the same thing. It's just the knowledge, like at that point in my computer evolution, the knowledge that oh my gosh, this isn't set in stone. Like I can use other file managers. That was revelatory enough for me that it really did kind of shift the way I thought about an operating system and a desktop and so on. So Thunar is kind of known as a lightweight file manager. It doesn't necessarily tap into a whole bunch of sub-processes. It is just kind of an application. Like I say, you can use it on lots of different desktops. It's just a thing in your toolkit that you can use when you (3/54)
need it. I would say the visual design, the overall design of Thunar is much like the rest of XFCE, quote, normal, unquote. By which I mean it's exactly what you'd expect. Like if someone says, hey, I have a file manager for you and they hand you Thunar, you are going to think, yes, that is a file manager. There's a side panel on the left containing common places that you frequently use. And then there's a big pane on the right that shows you the files and folders in whatever selection you have on the left. The side panel also has a designated area for removable devices like USB drives, SD cards, optical media, things like that. And also a place for network locations in the event that you're going to interact with a remote computer where a file share. Most options in Thunar are provided through the main menu. That includes the option to change the side pane to a tree view. So if you don't like the sort of just like here's a bunch of folders stacked on top of each other, you can just (4/54)
you can you can convert it to a tree view so that you can kind of see the hierarchy. You can have collapsible and expandable list. So if you're not using documents, then you can collapse that and just you just see documents. You don't see all the things inside of documents. Pretty handy. A lot of Thunar's true power is accessible through its menu bar. You can right click on things for a contextual menu, but really the I mean, that is contextual. So if you want to get an overview of what Thunar is capable of and frankly, some of the most powerful functions are in the main menu, you want to take a tour of the main menu first. You can invert a selection, for instance. That's a cool one. So if you've if you if you want to select and we all do this, I think you select everything in a folder, but you need to deselect one thing because that's the thing that you're going to move everything else into or whatever the scenario might be. So you can invert selection in the edit menu and choose (5/54)
invert selection. So you select the thing that you don't want selected, edit invert selection and now everything else but that is selected. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. You can also select by pattern. That's really cool. So you could just type in JPG and and you'll select all the JPG files ending in JPG. So that's really cool. Show hidden folders and files. So if you want to look at your dot files, it's right there in the main menu. Open terminal here. This is a beautiful one. It launches a terminal in in the location you are in Thunar, which is a great, great feature. I love that feature. I think the more we can bind the terminal to to like sort of quote unquote physical actions people are taking on their computer. I think the less mysterious the terminal becomes. You can also make a link like a sim link to a selected file or a folder. And this kind of the sim link thing kind of highlights to me made me think of just kind of how fast Thunar is. And it's not necessarily that oh (6/54)
my gosh it's just so so fast because it was written with such optimized code. There are definite choices being made here. I mean sure you know you don't have a bunch of frivolous animations and things like that happening so that kind of speeds things up. But there's really just kind of a decision again as with all of XFCE I think there was a decision made that things are going to be straight forward and simple. It just defaults Thunar does to performing the action you have requested. I mean there are file managers out there that we've probably all used that just seem to kind of insist that you have advanced knowledge of special shortcuts or it insists on interrupting a process in the interest of verification or clarification which granted sometimes is really important. But a lot of times Thunar only pauses when it absolutely needs feedback from you. A great example and the thing that made me think of this is the make link function in the edit menu. In some file managers when you create (7/54)
a sim link you're asked first you know like whether or not you really want to make that sim link. And then maybe what you like to name the sim link and even where you want the sim link to be created. And all of that is important information because it does result in a targeted and precise way and precise action. But sometimes you just don't need that precision. Sometimes you just want results which is why Thunar just when you say make a link it just makes the link. There's no questions. Now you might have to stop and like rename the link or move the link to another location or something like that later. But then again you might not. Maybe all you wanted to do was really quickly make a link. So in other words it doesn't front load decisions that you might be able to to stave off for later and that's a great thing about Thunar. But but the great thing about Thunar like the feature about Thunar this is the feature is its bulk rename tool. Like I see this referenced time and time again all (8/54)
over the place and it truly is a great feature. Now we all know maybe I know maybe you know I'm not sure who knows this but maybe you know that there are ways to rename files in bulk and there are lots of different ways to do this. You can probably think if you're familiar with like shell scripting you can probably think of a couple of loops or a couple of commands like a find command piped to well really just a find command I get. Nope. Pipe it to parallel so you can do the weird name escaping or is that a bashism? I don't know. You can probably think of a bunch of different ways to do like a bulk rename and you know what I'm talking about like your camera gives you a file called IMG underscore 2024 underscore 12 underscore dash 25 dash I've lost count of how many numbers I've got but then there's a time stamp and then dot jpg or whatever and there's a thousand of those you know and you think you know what I'm going to do I'm going to select these five hundred and three photos and I'm (9/54)
going to name them Christmas 2024 underscore 0001 or really just 000 right and then up to 502 so it seems like it should be an easy thing and again technically it kind of is you can think of a lot of loops and tricks to make that happen programmatically but there's a really easy way to do it with Doonar2 and that is you select the 503 files that you want to rename you right click and you select rename and now you have a bulk renaming interface that is a beautiful thing because it knows what you want to do like the whoever wrote this thing has done this thing before it has got two columns in the left column there's the current name in the right column it's the name that you are formulating and and you can formulate it based on a bunch of things there's a drop down menu for what you want to add to the name like numbering what numbering format would you like where would you like to start your numbering you want to start it at one or zero or five hundred and four maybe this is the next (10/54)
batch who knows and what kind of text do you want what specific what what what's the format you want text and then the number or do you want the number and then text or whatever and you get to see a preview of every choice that you're making right there in the right column so there are no surprises there's no chance of you accidentally naming I mean I guess there is a chance if you just ignore all warning but I mean there's a low low low chance of you naming something accidentally the exact same name and reducing five hundred and three files into oops one file that that just you kept writing over so it's a very very comforting and preview laden process and it is a beautiful interface it is a beautiful thing this honest I mean if people knew about this function that they're getting for zero dollars in thunar I honestly we we might have switched everyone over to Linux by now I mean really like this I can't tell you and maybe I'm just a power user I don't know I cannot tell you how many (11/54)
times in my past before I discovered Linux before I discovered thunar where I had like an innumerable number of files that I just wanted to rename and I could not figure it out like I tried I tried and I tried sometimes there'd be some kind of you know dodgy shareware type of thing that you could download for a free trial for just seven days and as long as you get all your renaming done within that time then you're good but you're also not sure what the heck you're downloading no this this just comes with thunar just casually I mean they should just name thunar the bulk renaming file manager because I mean this this is the feature of thunar it's amazing it's um it's it's worth its weight in gold or whatever so yes very cool next up is thunar volman volman for volume manager not volume audio but those removable drives remember in thunar I said on the left panel there are those drives uh there's that place for removable uh devices well this is the the component of thunar that manages (12/54)
those removable drives in media this is what makes a usb thumb drive or an optical disc pop up in that side panel you can configure thunar volman with the thunar dash volman dash settings application which is also accessible from the xfce system settings and you can define some pretty important things there like whether to automatically mount a remote a removable drive when it's hot plugged whether to auto run a program on a new drive or media whether to auto run files on a new drive or media all of which are thankfully disabled by default at least on slackware hopefully everywhere those all sound like horrible ideas but I guess maybe in some cases that's what people want I don't know all right next up is tumbler tumbler t-u-m-b-l-e-r at the time of recording there's a rather popular website t-u-m-b-l-r and this has no relationship to that tumbler is a dbus application for managing thumbnails of nearly any type an application can basically throw a uri at this tumbler component tumbler (13/54)
and then tumbler can determine based on your system settings whether it can or should send back a thumbnail so to get a good idea of the variables involved you can take a look at slash etc slash xdg slash tumbler dot r-c it knows from you know in this configuration file you can tell tumbler for instance to use the exit data of a jpeg file as long as it's under 209 million seven hundred and fifteen thousand two hundred bytes that's like roughly 210 megabytes you can configure it to download a movie poster thumbnail from an online database provided that you have an api key you can use you can tell it to use libopenraw to get a thumbnail for a raw image you can define the max file size that it should you know like i said like it'll ignore something if it's too big of a file and it would be too much trouble to try to extract a thumbnail from it you can define paths that never get thumbnails and so on so all of that stuff is in tumbler dot r-c it controls really just the thumbnails that you (14/54)
end up seeing when browsing file systems both locally and remote next up is xfce4 dash app finder this is a really neat one it's a search utility to help you discover applications on your system and to be honest it's basically just xfce's version of the plasma desktops application menu but i'm super happy it exists for xfce users because there's just no way around it application names are really hard they're cut they're hard to come up with you you want it to be memorable but you also want it to be descriptive and then you want it to be maybe clever but you also want it to be clear and you want people to be able to find it when they do a search for it like an online search and then as a user it's hard to know like sort of where to begin given all of those variables like it say you're a new Linux user and you want to play music I mean what do you do like how do you even begin I mean that's and that's true for any system right you're a new Mac user and you want to play music like (15/54)
literally what application do you launch I honestly don't even know I haven't used a Mac in sufficient a sufficient amount of time and I believe I heard that iTunes went away so what do you launch who knows I don't know I mean I don't care but but I mean that's the that's the that's the problem right we all have it we just don't know what an application is going to be called now the gnome desktop generally has been trying to present applications according to function rather than any sense of branding which is a fascinating experiment I don't hate it to watch a movie file you don't launch totem you launch videos you don't watch you don't you don't launch Nautilus to look at your file system you launch files I mean it works pretty well it's not bad there are disadvantages I think maybe I actually do care what file manager I'm using so I don't want to just launch files I want to launch specifically doonar today but tomorrow maybe I'll want to go and use Nautilus for something or whatever (16/54)
so that's that's a bit weird maybe the right answer is to provide essentially a sim link to the users favorite application based on the users choice for default application so in other words files that icon would be dynamically defined by the users environment or something but anyway that that's beside the point the another answer is to just provide the user with a robust search function so you want to play music you launch XFC e4 dash app finder and type in the word music and you get really sensible results audacious XMMS step okay step is a physics simulator so I don't know why that's listed there as I said application names are hard okay next up is XFC e4 clip man plug-in this is the clipboard manager for XFC e4 you use XFC e4 dash or no just XFC e dash clip man settings to launch the configuration window and then you can see how you can set how many entries you want to see in your clipboard and as with any clipboard manager when you copy something that thing gets added to the list (17/54)
of the recent things you've copied and then you can select what you want to sort of load into your active clipboard your primary clipboard to so that that's what you get when you next press ctrl V it's very handy it's very useful I could not live without it why gnome doesn't ship with one with a clipboard manager by default is beyond me frankly I think it's criminal after discovering clipboard managers that was another thing within Linux that just kind of changed everything for me and I honestly literally I cannot imagine life without a clipboard manager it just I don't think I could go back I couldn't use a computer without a clipboard manager at this point all right next up is XFC e4 dash dev tools these are build macros like their literal dot m4 files for developers who compile XFC e4 from its git repository macros of course we've used them in previous episodes when talking about the compile process but macros are just convenience functions so there's less setup you have to do as a (18/54)
developer when you're about to compile some code there are some executables that ship in this package as well there's XDT dash autogen that runs some commands to verify your environment and patches some files from the default state that they get committed to get to a state that's useful for actually building it runs the configure the dot slash configure command or I mean it's not dot slash but you know like when you type it it is dot slash configure command yeah and then it prompts you once it's done all of the things it tells you okay now you can run make most of them are shell scripts so you can kind of just read through them to see what they do they are a little bit like you know kind of like a slack build in a way they do the repetitious tasks to a known code base so that you and the 100 other developers working on that code base don't have to make a bunch of modifications every time you need to compile and and you're each doing it you know at home every single time you know that's (19/54)
that's a hundred people wasting a hundred hundred minutes of time well not anymore because these dev tools exist I would say that it's time for coffee I think that's the safe thing to assume and we're back with a cup of coffee I hope this this cup of coffee that I'm having right now it's one of those cups of coffee that just makes you sigh after you take your first sip you know it was just so good it's sort of the perfect perfect thing to start this this next sort of subsection which is just a bunch of XFCE4 dash packages and this is in the lead up to just why XFCE is so great again don't know if I'm gonna get into that discussion this episode but just take take mental note all right XFCE4 dash notify D the notification daemon for XFCE applications use this to trigger a notification they send a message through D bus this gets the message and shows a notification and of course you as the user you can configure how notifications behave using XFCE4 dash notify D dash config which launches (20/54)
a graphical settings window which of course you can also get to through the XFCE settings application it has a bunch of nice features like putting putting the computer into do not disturb mode so that you don't see the notifications you got theming options you've got default position which is super important whether it fades on and then fades out gently or whether it just pops on pops out XFCE4 panel that's the panel for XFCE it usually contains an application menu a little taskbar that lists currently running applications a pager for your virtual environments a system tray with your clock and like a network manager and a volume manager but this panel is a distinct application so like thunar and like apparently a lot of these XFCE components you can literally run it anywhere you hate the plasma desktop panel that's fun but you don't want to leave the plasma desktop that's fine just get rid of the panel and run XFCE panel instead you can do that if you're using fluxbox or blackbox or (21/54)
window maker and you want it to feel more like a proper desktop run XFCE4 panel this is modularity and it is kind of inordinately exciting like the pleasure of running XFCE panel on an otherwise barren window manager can't be fully described it you have to experience it because it's just so cool because it just instantly transforms that window manager into like a real desktop yeah and maybe that's not what you want and that's fine you don't have to have it but if that's what you do want but you're just looking for something a little bit more modular or something that doesn't take quite as much system resource or whatever then that's a great thing to be able to have the option to do this package also provides some fun extra commands like XFCE4-popup-application menu which like literally just causes the application menu of XFCE to pop open if you use it in a terminal that's kind of fun but I mean that's because the application menu is basically an applet within the panel it's like an (22/54)
add-on of the panel it's got XFCE4-popup-clipman which opens the clipboard manager yeah there's all kinds of little treats in here that kind of make you feel like a wizard because you do something in a terminal and suddenly something on your screen happens it's really really kind of fun actually and I mean think about it bind those commands to keyboard shortcuts or something and suddenly you're redefining how the computer responds to you it's it's it's oddly empowering this stuff like this is um this is really feeling very Unix-y. Next up XFCE4-panel-profiles I love this one this is so cool as with most Linux desktops you can configure what appears on your XFCE panel we'll get into that later at some other point there's another component for that but it is like like all of them it's very configurable so the XFCE developers figured I guess it would be nice to provide users a way to save configurations so that you can restore them or bring them over to another system or whatever so you (23/54)
can launch XFCE4-panel-profiles and you get a list of all the built-in panel configs the current one is whatever you're using right now but others include Cupertino which is a standard sort of application taskbar pager system tray bar along the top and a kind of a doc style panel on the bottom which has like the icons of your favorite applications and any active applications that are currently open. Gnome 2 mimics the Gnome 2 setup more or less I mean honestly there were more menus along the top in Gnome 2 I think there were three but those menus don't exist in XFCE so they're missing from from the Gnome 2 panel or the the Gnome 2-like panel. Redmond mimics some version of Microsoft Windows with just a panel along the the bottom of the screen and there's a menu labeled start so that'll get people who are just used to that paradigm started I guess and then Redmond 7 does a to my eyes which to be fair are very unpracticed in this I think it does a surprisingly good job of mimicking (24/54)
modern windows I mean it's got the modern looking application window it's got the pinned applications next to it it's got the clock and the network manager on the right so yeah it's quite nice and there are lots of profiles I mean that's just a handful that I selected it because they seemed notable but it's really easy to just cycle through them find one that you like it's one of the easier and most sort of gratifying and instant ways to just change your desktop I think that I've seen out of any of them I mean really like just reconfiguring the panel like that is is a really really powerful trick and it's so it's got to be so simple I can't believe I haven't seen this in any other desktop I don't understand like it's just such an obvious trick but I literally I've not seen it anywhere else so I love it it's great and of course you can save your own panel too you can make you make your own profiles those are the just the presets next up is Xfce4-power-manager this is an applet for your (25/54)
panel to manage and monitor how your computer uses electrical power whether you're on battery or mains and you you know the drill here you can set your screen to go blank after a certain amount of time of inactivity you can set your computer to go to sleep or not to go to sleep you can set your computer to behave differently if it's on battery and so on again just kind of what you would expect Xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin this is the volume control for the Xfce panel click the speaker icon you move the sliders you make things louder or softer for more control you can click the entry that that is just audio mixer it's a button at the bottom of your little pop-up control panel and that'll show you the volume control panel that looks a lot to me like Pavu control but I could be wrong maybe this is a distinct reimplementation of it I'm not really sure it might actually be Pavu control but maybe it just looks a little bit different because of the the theme that I have in Xfce as opposed to what (26/54)
I what I see elsewhere I'm not sure but if it's not literally Pavu control then it is a lot like Pavu control Xfce4-screensaver it's a screensaver this was actually built for the mate desktop and ported to Xfce I gotta say I love it simple it's clean you can configure it with Xfce4-screensaver-preferences it's really nice I would definitely use it over Xscreensaver which I can't help but feel is just a little chaotic this one is really really simple like you've got two choices of silly animations and and you or just to go blank blank and and I don't know it seems to work like I say I don't actually use screensavers all that often these days so who knows I haven't stress tested it next up is Xfce4-screenshooter this is a screenshot application it's fine it does what it needs to do but honestly I am personally very very used to KDE spectacle and I just kind of find it hard to use anything but spectacle I mean this is a fine app I'm not saying it's not good you launch it it asks you (27/54)
whether you want to capture the whole screen just a single window or a specific region that you can draw yourself you can set a delay before capture you can capture the mount the mouse pointer or not you can capture the window decoration or not and then you take the shot and then you save the file if you like it there is a cool feature here that I quite like that on the save like when you're on the save screen like when it's telling you it's offering to let you save it you can either save it locally or you can open it in an image viewer without like really saving it I mean it's it exists on your computer but I mean you're not saving it as a file or you can host it on I don't know how to say that website but I am G you are in imager whatever that site is it's a photo or a picture sharing site and that seems like a really cool and thoughtful feature like I can imagine sending something up to imager or whatever you however you say that when I'm like if I was troubleshooting something and (28/54)
I wanted to show someone like in a forum something but the forum didn't have a very good way to upload photos or whatever then yeah I could see that being a really useful feature I thought that was kind of cool XFCE4-session this one sets what applications get auto started when you log into XFCE and whether you autosave your current session when you log out whether you start gnome or KDE services upon startup little things like that it's session management options and they are nice I don't think they're strictly required I think I could actually live without that sort of thing but they are nice to have they can save a little bit of time I mean I do appreciate it on the plasma desktop when I when I turn on my computer in the morning most of my work environment is basically set up and ready to go I'm gonna have to log into a VPN and stuff like that but a lot of the applications that I was going to launch anyway they're just sitting there on the desktop where they were when I shut down (29/54)
it's really quite nice XFCE4-settings this is the settings manager of XFCE so a lot of the XFCE4-packages that I covered that I've been covering since since the coffee break here have been like individual setting panels for a specific component within XFCE desktop so XFCE4-settings well that's the package's name so literally XFCE4-settings-manager that's the command that that's the place where all of those disparate setting configuration panels are sort of brought together so you open XFCE4-settings-manager from the terminal or you can just select settings manager from the application menu and you get a list of all the setting panels available that's just kind of referencing the ones that we've already covered yeah and a couple a couple I think that we haven't covered yet but you know what I mean so there's a handy search bar at the top as well so you can find something that's not you know readily apparent to you from maybe the name of the panel and the configuration screens are sorted (30/54)
by category so there's personal for desktop behavior and clipboard manager and text editor settings and things that you interact with I guess on a frequent basis there's hardware which covers attached devices like display keyboard mouse audio power there's system category which has accessibility default apps session and startup that's obviously the XFCE-session one that I was just talking about other the other category has Bluetooth and settings editor which itself is included in this package as XFCE4-settings-editor the settings editor is a view into essentially a registry which I don't love but yeah it's it's a little database that has some some information about your current settings and the current state of specific applications so for instance if I click on thunar that's the entry over in the left it I can see over on the right that it contains a property called last-icon-view-zoom-level which is a string weirdly I would have thought that was going to be an integer like a zoom you (31/54)
know a percentage but the value it says is thunar underscore zoom underscore level underscore 100 underscore percent that's the weirdest way to do that but I guess I mean I have to guess that that's like an environment variable that gets passed to thunar when it launches or something I would have totally thought that would have been an integer with just 100 that's so weird but anyway that's that was the that that's an example of a thing in this little registry or this XFCONF thing so other executables in this package include the accessibility settings panel the display settings the keyboard settings and a few others one of my favorite inclusions though is the excellent XFCE4-find-cursor I love this it causes your mouse cursor to emit like a visual signal it looks like a little radar ping or something so that you can find it on your screen if you have I don't know terrible eyesight like I do and you lose track of where your stupid pointer is the number of times I have to like wiggle the (32/54)
mouse and like go up to the top of the screen so you sort of bring the cursor into my view like you cannot imagine it happens all the time it's literal tunnel tunnel vision like not not figurative like it is tunnel vision now unfortunately while the settings panel does have a little button here to enable the feature there's literally no indication of how to actually make it work other than issuing the command from the terminal it just says bind a keyboard shortcut to XFCE4-find-cursor to get visual feedback of the mouse pointer's current location it doesn't tell you what the what what the key is so I don't even know what I'm like I'm putting a little tick in this box but I don't know what I've just done it's just it's weird I mean I guess I could probably go and hunt down like how to bind a keyboard shortcut in XFCE to a an arbitrary command I'm sure it's probably not that hard it is just weird that here in the accessibility panel yes there's a checkbox to do it no there's no (33/54)
information on what you've just done and and I truly don't know how to do it so I I can see the effect by issuing the command in a terminal but the accessibility panel doesn't seem to affect whether that works or not I mean in my opinion and this might be this might sound maybe over the top hopefully not controversial but my opinion is that I think accessibility features or at least a hefty amount of accessibility features because I mean obviously there's a lot of possible accessibility features but I think that a bunch of them ought to be on by default and I know you're thinking wait on by default but I don't need them well my logic is I mean I don't need half of them either my logic is that you don't know what so-called accessibility feature you're going to end up loving if you've never seen what's possible like if I'd known that there were ping effects for mouse cursors earlier in my life I would have had them on all the time but I didn't find out about them until like a fedora (34/54)
conference and mo Duffy was doing a demonstration kept pinging the mouse cursor to bring our attention to that space on the screen and I just thought that's the coolest thing how did you do it and it's just an option that you can turn on in you know it's just always been there I mean I don't know if it's always been there but yeah I was just like oh well that's amazing and I have that on all the time now because I do love it it helps me and it helps an audience that I'm speaking to because you know failing like a laser pointer you've got a little pingable pointer on your screen it just makes so much sense and anyway if you need that feature then I'm going to bet that it's probably harder for you to turn it on than it is for me who decides I don't need that to turn it off right if it's an accessibility feature it's probably helpful to someone and harder for them to both know that it exists and to navigate the system to find it to turn it on then it is for someone who sees the feature (35/54)
and says oh I don't like that I'd better go to accessibility features and deactivate all of the accessibility features that is my opinion I'm I will absolutely stand by that it's just the first launch of a computer should have so many accessibility features that that you have to spend a full three minutes turning them off and that's all it would take you know most of us spend more time than that trying to choose a wallpaper I think we can go deactivate some accessibility features that as it turns out we don't want it and that's not unheard of like there are operating systems out there that when you boot them up if you don't respond within some amount of time it starts talking to you and how useful is that for someone who can't see the screen pretty useful I would imagine so yeah it's just it's it's important so this is out of order a little bit but it makes sense to talk about this one now because we I'm just talking about the registry so XF conf this is the package that contains the (36/54)
XF conf dash query command which queries the registry the XF conf registry or whatever they call it I don't actually know what they call it but it's the one that you that that I was just talking about in XF CE for dash settings editor for example XF conch dash query space dash dash channel thunar dash dash property forward slash last dash icon dash view dash zoom dash level hit return and yes sure enough there it is thunar underscore zoom underscore level underscore 100 underscore percent it's very very confusing and frankly very very annoying that properties must be for whatever reason and I don't know why preceded by a forward slash I don't know why there's not really any indication of that in the GUI version of this registry so I don't know why or how I would know to do that in XF conf now luckily XF conch query is a pretty kind command if you know to ask for it to ask it for more information like the dash dash list option actually reveals to you like what entries you have to choose (37/54)
from so if you don't know what channels there are available then you can just type XF conf dash dash list and you get a full listing of the channel and so then maybe now that you know the channels you decide well I want to see some properties but I don't know what properties there are no worries XF conf dash dash channel thunar dash dash list and that shows you what properties are exist in in the channel and that is where you see the forward slash and that's the only way I knew to use forward slash in the end because I kept trying to do properties thunar dash icon dash view or whatever and it just kept telling me there was no such property and I thought I know there's a property like that I saw it in there in the GUI registry but yeah you just have to put a forward slash in front of it and you do find that out if you look at the dash dash list this is definitely one of the easier query style commands I've I've used like I find this very very useful introspection I've said it before (38/54)
keep saying it it's a beautiful thing XFCE4 dash system load dash plug-in this is an applet for your panel so it monitors the CPU and the memory load on your computer and it exists only to exist in the panel and there are a couple of things that that are like that like the application menu you can't just like have an application menu it has to be sort of bound to a panel same thing for this system load plug-in it isn't like a widget that'll just appear on your desktop it needs a panel to appear in so in XFCE4 to customize a panel you just right click on it and then in this case you can select add new item to see a list of panel plugins that those are going to include like the basics like you know an application or the applications menu uh clipman the clipboard manager a clock and appropriately system load monitor which is of course the system load dash plug-in that we're looking at right now XFCE4 dash weather dash plug-in this is out of order this isn't alphabetical but it does fit (39/54)
nicely here since we're talking about plugins yep there's a weather plug-in that appears in a panel if you add it to the panel just like the system load monitor one XFCE4 dash whisker menu dash plug-in again out of order but it fits in here because we're talking about plugins this is an application menu um applet or i guess plug-in for the XFCE panel this is the superior application menu to i guess what i guess what is the standard XFCE1 um because it's kind of i say standard i mean i don't know what XFCE considers standard but it does appear to be the one that i see more often i did not know the whisker menu uh version existed until i saw the uh redman seven theme for the panel and that's when i realized oh they they're hiding they're hiding a better menu somewhere and here it is so this is like one of those modern style menus that like lists the application categories on the left and then the applications available on the right and more importantly i think it's got a search bar right (40/54)
at the bottom so it's got basically XFCE4 dash app finder just built in and again i don't know if that's literally the app finder i don't know if like that's like just a call to that to that same code or whether they just copy and pasted the code i don't know i didn't look at the code to find out but it's that style of menu where you can either navigate by clicking around or you just type what what you want i love this kind of menu for the same reason that i love app finder um i don't know what i would do without it to be honest i guess i would just use like um you know alt f2 and do the like the k runner or uh fb run or whatever or i would just like make my own application menu from like a folder of sim links or something like that but i don't have to do that in in any desktop on linux much less xfce because this one has whisker menu and it's much better than the standard menu in my opinion okay back back to the alphabet uh xfce4 dash task manager uh task manager or task monitor i (41/54)
thought the bar that showed up um lately showed up in the panel where your open applications show up i i thought that was called a task manager am i wrong i don't i don't know as i've said many times before on this show i learned computing on max for better or for worse when i was growing up and then i switched to linux uh and and honestly i'm still learning like the the non-mac terminology but i have to do it sort of catch as catch can and i might be learning something now um i don't know this is called a task manager but it's not a space in the panel that shows you you're running applications uh it is it's like literally a graphic well i don't know if it's literally it is a graphical version of top i have to assume it's like literally a graphical version of top because i mean it shows running processes the pit of each the cpu load the memory usage the nice value and all that other stuff and you can right click on any item in that list to get a contextual menu that lets you stop (42/54)
terminate kill or adjust the priority of the process so yeah it's it's a it's really nice i mean i could i could maybe imagine using that maybe i don't know i'd have to learn it and that sounds like work i'd probably just continue to use top or htop but it is nice i do like that i like that quite a lot xfce4-terminal this is the terminal emulator for xfce and you might wonder whether you really need yet another terminal emulator but like text editors i think it's i think it's safe to say that you just kind of can't have too many and i know that seems like a bold statement the second bold statement of the episode um and and i'll admit yeah maybe not literally but colloquially i think we could say that rather safely there's always like one little feature that justifies it i wonder if there will be one for xfce4-terminal spoiler alert yes there is but i'm not going to say it yet first we'll talk about xfce4-terminal it's you know like a window into the shell right i mean that's that's (43/54)
what you want from a terminal that's what it does it gives you it gives you access to the shell and it's got a graphical settings panel like console or gnome terminal do so you're not like editing plain text files for better or for worse i mean the the text configurations are cool i like them but then again they've got that negative aspect of like how do you even know what properties you're supposed to be editing like what you know you're just kind of you just make stuff up and hope there they exist like it is a very blank slate whereas a gooey configuration you know exactly what you have to choose from so that's a positive that's the positive aspect of that and i mean there are some really good configuration options here i mean like they get they get really precise like you can choose your the default character break for a string like how you define a string when you double click on text is it just a single space or is it some other character i mean it really really gets into the (44/54)
weeds here you can choose your default character encoding of course you can disable alt shortcuts to the terminals window so that your um you know favorite bash shortcuts are are passed through to the shell and they're not intercepted by like the terminals menu which is a great feature love that you can set a font uh you can choose new color themes or load a color theme from a list of common presets it's got an optional toolbar across the top if you like buttons uh all that kind of standard stuff for terminals you you know you to to to a degree you could look at this and and not really know whether it was xfce or gnome like it would be easy to mistake the two for each other i think but i did say there was one feature one feature about this that justifies its very existence and that feature is it's going to seem kind of simple maybe but i mean i don't know you might appreciate it i appreciate it so you go to uh the edit menu go to terminal preferences and go to the colors tab along the (45/54)
top and enable these two settings use system theme colors for text and background and vary the background color for each tab now close and relaunch your terminal and open up some tabs every tab like the the the the background of a terminal of the your terminal window for every tab is a unique color yeah so i mean it's a simple trick but can you imagine how much better that will be when you're ssh into eight different computers and you're trying to remember which is which and the the the one thing you don't want to do is pseudo space power off to some mission critical server right so i usually modify my prompt like i'll have like some kind of ridiculous prompt to remind me hey you're not on your you're not on your local host right now you're on the remote system in this terminal window or in this terminal tab the problem with that is that you do start to kind of filter out the prompt eventually it's a weird phenomenon or at least i do like i can make the prompt whatever i want to make (46/54)
it and somehow i'll just i'll filter it out it's just this is a terminal i'll just type random stuff into it and see what happens that's fine on your own computer but it's not fine on your web server or whatever so having a unique color in the background i think makes it sometimes a little easier to to not filter it out you know like it's just i don't know there's something about like oh that background is red i know that the one that i was using on my real on my local computer was blue or whatever um the other the other way to do that of course is just to have a different terminal like a physical a different like not physical but a different terminal emulator for your home and then have the other emulator for the remote boxes that's another easy trick but i i do like this idea of different color backgrounds for each tab i think that's a really cool idea really nice little trick and i think um you should try it sometime if you haven't if you have if you've ever you know made a mistake (47/54)
on a on a foreign machine yeah give that a go see see if that if that helps very nice terminal no notes all right let's get through um the rest of xfce there are only two more packages to go and then we'll be out we'll be out of xfce completely this is very exciting this is xf desktop this is the actual desktop and by desktop i mean really just the desktop um so we've seen all of the major components of xfce4 over the past couple of episodes like they're individual applications and commands and so when you say well what is the xfce desktop if it's not all that then this is the only thing that's left and all that's left is the root window like the place where you put a wallpaper like the the part of your screen that you're looking at like that big blank empty area that's the desktop and maybe some general management of like minimized application icons and file icons and odds and ends like that there's probably some some code sort of integration in here to tie components together a (48/54)
little bit which i i would imagine because i when i launched the xfce panel in fluxbox for instance i don't get like the pretty gray bird theme by default although i guess maybe that's just like a dot i don't know gtkrc setting or something i'm not really sure i haven't looked into it i didn't try changing or setting a theme or anything but i'm just thinking that maybe there's some code on xf desktop that that kind of brings it all together maybe either way it definitely just manages that big empty space in the background like what picture do you want to see today xf desktop will take care of that for you um everything else all those other components like that's the that's like the desktop you know this is like the desktop all the other components are the things that you have sitting on the desk like a panel and plugins in the panel and application menus and thunar and a settings um control panel settings those are all separate component this is um the the desktop sort of settings they (49/54)