Hints And Tips

Hints and Tips

Please add your own hints and tips here!

Sections

• General hints (see below)
• Speed hints -- making your computer boot and run faster
• Scripting hints -- advanced hints
• Window managers hints -- customizations to make WMs to work better with ROX
• HAL hints -- Using ROX with HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) to make removable media pop up on your panels and stuff like that.
• Theme Gallery -- change the appearance of your desktop

Drag and drop hints

Each application's savebox contains an icon representing the file to save. You can drag this icon to a ROX-Filer window, a directory on a pinboard or panel, or to another application. For example, if you want to save a compressed text file, drag from Edit's savebox onto Archive, and then drag the compressed data to a filer window to actually save it.

How do I open a directory in a new window?

Click with the middle mouse button (both buttons at once on two-button mice).

How do I move icons around on the panels?

Drag them with the middle mouse button.

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.

How can I set applications or directories to open on a keypress?

Drag an application, directory or file onto the pinboard or a panel. Bring up the menu and choose Edit Item. Set the shortcut there. These shortcuts can be used whatever else you are doing, so don't use a shortcut that's often used for something else, like F1!

Can I open every file in a selection as if I clicked on them one by one?

Yes. Drag the selection onto ROX-Filer (that is, open the directory containing 'ROX-Filer' itself and drag to it). You can add ROX-Filer to the Send To menu so that clicking Shift+Menu over the selection will let you do this easily.

Can I set it up so that clicking on an RPM or Debian package will install it as root (after entering the password)?

Yes. Open the menu over an RPM and choose 'Set Run Action...'. Set the command to:

gnomesu -u root -e -c "rpm -i \"$1\""

You'll need the latest version of gnomesu installed.

Can shells such as bash be made application directory aware?

You can use this patch to add support to bash.

Can I access FTP sites using the filer?

Yes, if you can make them appear as part of the filesystem. Some projects that allow this include:

• lufs
• avfs

Note that AVFS is turned on on a per-process basis. So make sure you turn it on in the script that runs ROX-Filer (eg, ROX-Session/RunROX), not something that starts later (like your .zshrc file, which will only affect things started from the shell).

Drag and drop saving is great, but can I keep the save box above all other windows while I'm using the filer?

All saveboxes (including the Copy/Rename/Link saveboxes in the filer) are marked with the 'Savebox' class so your window manager can recognise them.

For example, sawfish users should choose 'Customise->Matched Windows' and add a new rule. The matcher should be 'Class' and you can use Grab to copy the value by clicking on any savebox. Set 'Depth' to a high number to keep it above other windows.

Users of OroboROX, which on its own doesn't have an interface for this, may find Devil's Pie to be useful. You'll need to manually create the /.devilspie.xml file and the add something like (I hope):

 <flurb name="Savebox on top">
  <matchers>
   <matcher name="DevilsPieMatcherWindowName">
    <property name="class_name" value="Savebox" />
   </matcher>
 </matchers>
  <actions>
   <action name="DevilsPieActionLayer">
    <property name="above" value="TRUE"/>
   </action>
  </actions>
 </flurb>

How do you stop messages coming up on the screen from some specific programs?

See the Runtime Errors FAQ.