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Window managers, pagers, etc.

Using ROX with Ion

Spending too much time organising your windows instead of getting things done? Tiling window managers aim to handle the layout for you. In this article, I'll show how to configure Ion 3 to work with ROX.

ToggleDesktop

Summary: 
Toggle Show/Hide Window
Current stable version: 
0.0.1
Primary author(s): 
Yasuhiro Matsumoto

Summary:
Toggle Show/Hide Window

Current stable version:
0.0.1

Primary author(s):
Yasuhiro Matsumoto

Can I stop my window manager from covering the panel?

The filer asks the WM to not cover a few pixels at the edge of the screen. When you move the pointer over the edge of the screen, the panel
comes to the front. If this doesn't work, try a different window manager (works fine with XFWM4).
XFWM4 also lets you configure the desktop margins, which you can use to stop windows going too near the edge of the screen.
Some window managers, such as sawfish, also allow you to mark certain windows with the avoid flag to stop them from being covered at all.

Enabling border panels

Side panels can be managed by ROX-Filer, but by default they are not turned on. They allow you to create short-cuts to files, directories and applications. Panels work much like the pinboard (the desktop background), except that they come to the front when the mouse hits the edge of the screen and the layout is more rigid. You can also run small programs called applets inside a panel.

Adding a "show desktop" button

OroboROX lets you define a keyboard short-cut for this.

For other window managers, or if you want a clickable button, Andras Mohari suggests this script:

#!/bin/sh
if wmctrl -m | grep -q '"showing the desktop" mode: ON'; then
	exec wmctrl -k off
else
	exec wmctrl -k on
fi

This requires the wmctrl program and was tested using xfwm4 (should work with any other EWMH-compatible window manager that implements the 'show desktop' feature, at least in theory).

Save the script and set its permissions to make it executable (File -> Permissions).

OroboROX

Summary: 
a lightweight Window Manager for ROX
Current stable version: 
0.9.7.9
Primary author(s): 
Guido Schimmels and Jonatan Liljedahl

Summary:
a lightweight Window Manager for ROX

Current stable version:
0.9.7.9

Primary author(s):
Guido Schimmels and Jonatan Liljedahl

Choosing a window manager

This assumes that you are running ROX-Session.

There are three different methods you can use:

  1. Click on the window manager you want in a ROX-Filer window. For example, you could click on OroboROX to switch to that.
  2. If you don't have a wrapper for your window manager (and you don't want to make one),
    just quit your current window manager and ROX-Session will ask you to type in the name of a window manager to use. If your window manager doesn't have a quit feature, you can kill it using System or a similar process monitor.

Pager

Summary: 
an application and panel applet that shows a miniature view of your desktop.
Current stable version: 
1.1
Primary author(s): 
Thomas Leonard

Summary:
an application and panel applet that shows a miniature view of your desktop.

Current stable version:
1.1

Primary author(s):
Thomas Leonard

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