ENLIGHTENMENT(1) Enlightenment Man Pages ENLIGHTENMENT(1)NAME
Enlightenment - The Window Manager that dares to do what
others don't
WARNING
This documentation is automatically generated for you from
the online help documentation. It is NOT to be considered
a full substitute for this documentation. It may be
accessed by middle clicking on your desktop and selecting
the "Help" item. If you are not currently running
enlightenment, you may access this documentation by
running the dox Help Browser To do this, run
ENLIGHTENMENT_BIN/dox ENLIGHTENMENT_ROOT/E-docs (where BIN
and ROOT are the locations of your e binaries and shared
files, respectively)
DESCRIPTION
Enlightenment version 0.16.5
Topics: How To Use Documentation About Enlightenment
Copyright Credits Website IRC Email
User Documentation Frequently Asked Questions
Welcome to the Enlightenment Documentation Viewer. Please
select a topic from the list.
This Documentation is intended to take you step by step
through Enlightenment and its default setup, how to use
it, modify settings, and put it to use for you. When you
have finished reading each page please press the NEXT
button on the top of this window to go to the next page,
or use the Back button until you have reached the Docs
Index
If you are reading this right now you have managed to get
Enlightenment itself installed correctly and are either
running Enlightenment for the first time or have just
upgraded to a new version. Congratulations. Now it's time
to take you on a quick tour of the desktop you will have
before you.
Please remember that if you use a theme other than the
default (Brushed Metal) that it may look slightly or
completely different to the contents of this User
Documentation. Some behavior may also vary.
To relaunch this Help Browser at any time, middle click on
your desktop and select the "Help" Item. The
documentation should come back up, reloading to the first
page. You can also use the "Home" key to take you back to
the introduction page at any time during the program.
Enlightenment is your Window Manager. The Window Manager
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controls the appearance of the borders of your windows,
their behavior and all user interaction with positioning,
killing, resizing, moving, iconifying, shading etc. your
windows, virtual desktops, multiple desktops, menus
attached to windows and some root window menus and can
also control the background of your desktop(s).
Enlightenment is a large and complex program and is by no
means perfect, but it is being worked on and is as stable
as possible. It has many advanced features, but may also
be missing some features that you would like to see. The
version you are now running (0.16.5) is by no means the
end of development and improvements, fixes and new
exciting features are being worked on all the time. Please
visit the
Web site often for new versions, fixes, patches and
updates.
We hope that you enjoy using Enlightenment as much as we
have enjoyed writing it. We'd like to think that even if
this isn't the right software for you, you at least can
have fun playing around with what we have created.
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 The Enlightenment Development Team
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any
person obtaining a copy of this software and associated
documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the
Software without restriction, including without limitation
the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the
Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice
shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of
the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS
BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,
ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR
THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Enlightenment has been written by:
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler), Mandrake (Geoff
Harrison), Chutt (Isaac Richards), Michael Jennings
(KainX), Christian Kreibich (cK), Sung-Hyun Nam, Kimball
Thurston, Michael Kellen, Frederic Devernay, Felix
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Bellaby, Peter Kjellerstedt, Troy Pesola, Owen Taylor,
Stalyn, Knut Neumann, Nathan Heagy, Simon Forman, Brent
Nelson, Martin Tyler, Graham MacDonald, Jesse Michael,
Paul Duncan, Daniel Erat, Tom Gilbert, Peter Alm, Ben
FrantzDale, Hallvar Helleseth, Kameran Kashani, Carl
Strasen, David Mason, Tom Christiansen And others (see
AUTHORS file).
A big thanks to several companies that helped support
Enlightenment.
Red Hat Software (www.redhat.com) for allowing developers
resources and time to work on Enlightenment.
VA Linux Systems (www.valinux.com) for providing hardware,
bandwidth, Coke, and the patience to hire a couple of
loony bin candidates to work on something we (and
hopefully you) think is interesting.
Xi Graphics (www.xig.com) for providing X servers to test
out code on.
Not only should these people be thanked, but the whole E
community - those on the E mailing list, on #E on IRC on
openprojects.net and all E users who have provided
feedback and debugging information, bug-fixes, patches and
support. A big thanks goes out to all of you who make a
project like this possible.
In addition we'd like to thank several other projects -
such as XFree86, Imlib, Esound, Freetype and many others,
The people working on these equally important projects
should not be forgotten.
For updated information on Enlightenment, development,
bug-fixes, snapshots of development versions etc. please
visit:
http://www.enlightenment.org/
You may want to visit this site often as it changes
regularly with fixes and development releases -- also
visiting the daily-snapshots section on the FTP site is a
good idea (see the snapshots section on the website for
more information).
There is an Official Enlightenment IRC channel where you
can go and "hang out" if you want - talk to other E users,
developers, get some help, drool together, or whatever. #E
will kill me for this but get onto any openprojects irc
server (irc.openprojects.net) then join #E. For example:
epic4 your_nick irc.openprojects.net
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or
irc your_nick irc.efnet.org
or use your favorite graphical IRC client.
Please remember that it can get busy with 100's of people
talking at once. Not everyone is actually listening all
the time or are in the middle of a conversation. Be polite
and patient, and have a sense of humor and you'll have
fun.
CVS Commit List Mail
To receive CVS Commit mails, please go to the CVS Commits
List mail page:
http://www.enlightenment.org/mailman/listinfo/cvs-commits-
list
This mailing list does not accept user-submissions. It is
automatically generated email that is sent out whenever
the enlightenment CVS server receives a commit. Sometimes
it can generate a lot of email, sometimes it doesn't.
Developer Mailing List
If you would like to receive mail from the developer
mailing list, please go to the E-develop Mailing List mail
page: http://enlightenment.org/mailman/listinfo/e-develop.
This mailing list is for discussing Enlightenment and it's
development, bugs, feature requests, etc. It is not a
general chatter list. The developers do read this mailing
list and will often comment on subjects brought up on the
list.
Welcome To Enlightenment
Basic Intro Using Menus Mouse Bindings Mouse Configuration
Using The Window Border Changing Window Borders Default
Keybindings Multiple Desktops Changing Desktops Taking
Apps Between Desks The Dragbar The Pager The Iconbox
Recovering Minimized Apps Remembering App Properties Intro
To Settings Window Groups
Desktop Backgrounds Tooltips Audio Special Effects Setting
The Focus Moving Windows Resizing Windows Window
Operations Window Placement Options Autoraise Settings KDE
and GNOME Support Quick Intro to IPC How To Edit Menus How
To Change Keybindings Themes Extra Eyecandy Maintenance
Scripts
Now that you have started Enlightenment, if you are using
it for your desktop shell, your screen should look
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something like the image here on the left.
Across the whole top of the screen you will see a bar with
arrows pointing up and down on the left and right ends.
This is your desktop Dragbar .
On the bottom-left you'll see 3 boxes. The top box with
the scrollbar attached will be your Iconbox.
The other 2 boxes below it are Pagers for desktops 0 and
1. Everything else is your desktop background.
Using Menus When you click with your left mouse button on
the desktop background you will see an "User Menus" menu
appear (example displayed on the right here).
Applications you may have installed will appear in this
menu. To launch one of them simply select it from the
menu.
Note: Menus in Enlightenment work like most menu systems.
Either hold down the mouse button and navigate with the
button down, releasing on the selection you want, or
release elsewhere to not select anything. You can also
quickly click and release, then navigate: move the mouse,
and click again on the item you wish to select, or
elsewhere if you do not wish to select an entry.
To "stick" a menu up and leave it up so you can select
items from it multiple times, click and hold down the
mouse and release on the title of the menu (if it has one)
and it will remain up. You can move it and manipulate it
like a normal window. Close the window to unstick the
menu.
Clicking the middle button on the desktop background will
display Enlightenment's main menu. You can access the
other menus plus more options from this menu (including
those to log out, restart and display Help information). A
sample of this menu is shown to our left.
When you click the right mouse button a menu with the
title "Settings" will appear. This is Enlightenment's
settings menu. From it you can select various
configuration dialogs that will assist you in customizing
your desktop to better suit your needs.
Mouse Bindings Of course, when you click on the desktop
background of your screen, normally you will bring up a
menu. And of course, when you click on the border of a
window, you will do various things. But these are not the
only things you can do with your mouse.
In Enlightenment, there are several other actions that the
mouse can do by default. For example, by holding down the
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ALT key when you click the left mouse button anywhere in a
window, you will find that you can move the window around
the screen, just as if you had used the titlebar. You can
also ALT middle-click in a window to resize it, or use ALT
and right-click to bring up the Window Operations Menu.
You will find that holding down the ALT key while clicking
the middle mouse button on the background of your desktop
will bring up a menu with the titles of all currently
active application windows. Selecting one of these will
take you to that application. By using the CTRL key
instead of ALT you will get a menu displaying all current
desktops as sub-menus, with applications on each desktop
in the desktop sub-menu.
Mouse Configuration
Enlightenment makes extensive use of the mouse. However,
you may be missing some features because of the way that
your mouse is configured on your X server.
If your mouse does not have a middle button you should
enable "Emulate 3 Buttons" in your X server. This option
allows you to emulate a three-button mouse by pressing
both left and right mouse buttons at once. If this does
not work, three-button emulation may not be enabled. See
your X server documentation to configure this emulation.
This may vary from system to system. The OS and X server
may also vary the method in which you do this, if it is
possible. Not having a middle mouse button in
Enlightenment, or for that matter X, is not a good thing
as it is almost assumed to be there, and is used by many
applications, including E.
If you have a Wheel-Mouse and X is configured to use it,
Enlightenment supports it by default.
Rolling your wheel up on the desktop background will take
you back a desktop . Rolling your wheel downward you will
advance forward a desktop.
If this doesn't work, then it may be you haven't
configured your X server to understand a mouse with a
wheel. If you use XFree86 you may need to edit your
XF86Config to have a "Pointer" Section like:
Section "Pointer"
Protocol "MousemanPlusPS/2"
Device "/dev/mouse"
ZAxisMapping 4 5
Buttons 5
EndSection
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You may need to modify this for your mouse.
Using the Window Border When you start an application,
unless it has special properties, it will come up on your
screen with a border surrounding it that contains a
titlebar and several control buttons. This border is the
primary interface to controlling an application window.
The Default setup (shown on the next page) gives adequate
control but still retains simplicity.
If you click left mouse button on the titlebar and keep
the mouse button down the window will follow your mouse
wherever it moves. Respectively if you click your left
mouse button and drag on any of the resize handles, the
window will be resized in that direction. Clicking right
mouse button on the resize handles will raise the windows
to the top.
Clicking right mouse button on the titlebar or any button
on the window operations menu button on the top-left will
display a menu that has window manipulation options in it.
Double-Clicking (clicking the mouse twice in succession
really fast) will make the Window shade or unshade
(depending if it was unshaded or shaded to start with).
Clicking left mouse button on the iconify button will
iconify the window and send it off to the Iconbox .
Hitting the Maximize button will maximize the size of the
application fill your screen. Hitting it again will
Unmaximize, bringing the window back to its normal size.
Clicking with the left mouse button on the close button
will close the window. If the application that owns that
window does not respond to a nice request to exit, then
press the right mouse button on the close button to
forcibly terminate that window. This should not be used
unless the application is visibly "hung".
In addition to these methods, there are additional ways to
manipulation windows.
If you hold down the ALT key and hold down left mouse
button anywhere in the window (on the border OR in the
application part) while dragging, you will move this
window around. Doing the same but with the middle mouse
button will resize the window in that direction. Clicking
the right mouse button anywhere in the window while
holding down the ALT key will bring up the window
operations menu.
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Changing Window Borders
From time to time you may find that you don't like a
particular border that a window uses, for some reason or
another. You can easily change the border style of a
window in Enlightenment using the
Window Operations menu, however. Select the "Set Border
Style" menu, and a list will be presented to you of
available borders in this theme. The most common use for
this is to make an application shed its border, using the
BORDERLESS border type.
You can always click with ALT + Right mouse button
anywhere in the window to bring up the window operations
menu again.
If you want to remember the border style for the next time
you run this application, you can always use the Remember
dialog to remember the current window border.
Default Keybindings
Below are the keybindings for E as it comes "from the
factory"
CTRL+ALT+Home - Re-shuffle windows on screen to be Clean
CTRL+ALT+Del - Exit Enlightenment and Log Out
CTRL+ALT+End - Restart Enlightenment
CTRL+ALT+Up-Arrow - Raise window to top
CTRL+ALT+Down-Arrow - Lower window to the bottom
CTRL+ALT+Left-Arrow - Go to the previous desktop
CTRL+ALT+Right-Arrow - Go to the next desktop
CTRL+ALT+X - Close the currently focused window
CTRL+ALT+K - Kill the currently focused window nastily
CTRL+ALT+R - Shade/Unshade the currently focused window
CTRL+ALT+I - Iconify the currently focused window
CTRL+ALT+R - Shade/Unshade the currently focused window
CTRL+ALT+S - Stick/Unstick the currently focused window
CTRL+ALT+(F1 - F12) - Go directly to desktops 0 - 11
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ALT+Tab - Switch focus to the next window
ALT+Enter - Zoom/Unzoom the currently focused window
SHIFT+ALT+Left-Arrow - Move to the virtual desktop on the
left if there is one
SHIFT+ALT+Right-Arrow - Move to the virtual desktop on the
right if there is one
SHIFT+ALT+Up-Arrow - Move to the virtual desktop above if
there is one
SHIFT+ALT+Down-Arrow - Move to the virtual desktop below
if there is one
Note: Zooming in and out of windows will only work if you
have an XFree86 server or one that implements the
Xf86VidMode extension. You also need to define lots of
screen modes for your display, so ensure your "Display"
subsection of your XF86Config looks like:
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480" "512x384" "400x300" "320x240"
EndSubSection
Have a "Display" subsection per depth (this example is for
16 bit) and all the resolutions defined as above.
Multiple & Virtual Desktops
Enlightenment supports both Multiple and Virtual desktops.
There are distinct difference between the two, and
Enlightenment treats them differently.
When you start Enlightenment you will by default have two
desktops. In Enlightenment desktops are geometrically
unrelated work areas. They are visually stacked on top of
each other and can even be dragged down to expose desktops
underneath.
The best way to imagine this is that each desktop is a
sheet of paper with the first desktop (desktop 0) being
glued in-place. You can re-shuffle the stack of papers and
slide one down to reveal a piece of paper underneath - the
only paper you can't slide is the first one. Each desktop
(or sheet) contains your application windows.
Windows normally live on one desktop, but can be made to
exist on all desktops - whenever you change to a new
desktop the window will follow you and be on that desktop
too. This is known as being sticky. if a window is sticky
it will "stick to the glass of your screen" and stay there
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until it is not sticky anymore or the window is closed.
Virtual desktops (also known as desktop areas) is a
measure of how big your desktops are. A desktop can be a
multiple of your screen size in size (2x1, 2x2, 3x3, 4x2
etc.). That means each desktop has an AxB screen size of
area allocated to it and you can be looking at any screen-
sized part of it at any time. It's just like getting more
sheets of paper and taping them to the sides of your
current sheet of paper. An easy way of changing your view
is by just sliding your mouse in the direction of a
currently unviewable part of your desktop. As long as you
have Edge Flip enabled Enlightenment will automatically
scroll over to that part of the desktop.
To change the number of virtual desktops that you have,
use the "Multiple Desktop Settings" dialog from the right
mouse settings menu . You should see a menu that looks
something like the menu to the right. You can use the
slider bar to quickly select the appropriate number of
virtual desktops you would like to use.
To change the number of virtual areas, use the "Virtual
Desktop Settings" menu. This will bring up a menu that
looks something like the one on the left. Use the slider
bars to extend the size of the virtual areas to the size
that you prefer. You can also use this dialog to
enable/disable edge resistance (when your mouse hits the
edge of an area) moving between virtual areas.
Enlightenment also allows you to set a different desktop
backdrop per desktop to help you customize your
environment and differentiate which desktop is which.
An easy way of having Enlightenment automatically pick up
any pictures you have is to make a directory in your
~/.enlightenment directory called backgrounds and then
fill that with your favorite backdrops. Enlightenment will
automatically discover this and index them for you
allowing you to select them and change their settings.
More on this topic is explained in the Desktop Backgrounds
section.
Changing Desktops
There are several ways that you can change your current
desktop - let's go over a few of them here.
You can use the Keybindings alt-F1 through alt-F12 for the
first 12 desktops. You can use the Keybindings Ctrl-Alt-
Left and Ctrl-Alt-Right to navigate to the next/previous
desktop. You can use the Keybindings shift-alt-
directional arrow to change virtual areas in a given
direction. You can use the Pager to quickly navigate to
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the desktop/area you want by clicking on the desired area.
You can use the Dragbar to quickly navigate to a
particular application or a particular desktop by using
the middle and right mouse buttons. You can also use
external applications such as the GNOME panel's pager or
the KDE panel's pager to navigate desktops and/or
applications. You will need to enable Desktop Support for
these to work.
Moving Applications Between Desktops
There are several ways that you can move applications from
one desktop to another. We'll go over a few of them now.
The first way you can move apps between desktops is using
the Pager.
You can also move applications between desktops using the
Dragbar.
You can also move applications between desktops using the
KDE or GNOME desktop pagers.
You can also move a window, then bring the window with you
as you change desktops using keybinding. =head2 The
Dragbar
If you look along the top of your screen, you will notice
a long thin bar that looks something like the bar pictured
below. This is called your Dragbar. It gets its name
from its primary purpose, which is dragging desktops
around.
If you are on any desktop except desktop 0, you can pick
up and move that desktop in another direction. Desktops
documentation has more information on how to change
desktops. Once you have dragged a desktop down, you can
proceed to move windows between desktops this way, instead
of using the pager.
You can also use the Dragbar to retrieve windowlists. Use
the middle mouse button to retrieve a windowlist, and the
right mouse button for a windowlist sorted by desktops.
The Pager Pagers may not be a new idea in desktop
environments, but the Pager in Enlightenment (as seen on
the right) is a highly advanced and highly configurable
tool for desktop and window control, as well as a
navigation tool.
The pager lets you see your desktop screen area in
miniature. It lets you click on a certain desktop to
"visit" it, click and drag windows around in the pager
itself to move them about the screen quickly, or between
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desktops. In this example, we have two virtual areas. You
can see the current area (the one with the windows in it)
is also highlighted.
Dragging a window from one area of a pager to another will
move it there, or to another desktop. Dragging it out
onto the actual desktop will drop that window right there.
You can also drag a window into the Iconbox to iconify the
window.
Pressing right-mouse button over a blank portion of the
pager gets you the pager menu, allowing you to change
settings. This will allow you to set a couple of quick
options, as shown on the left. For more available
options, you can select the "Pager Settings" item, and
another dialog will pop up, that looks like the one below.
This dialog box will allow you to set all sorts of
additional parameters, many of which can increase the
performance of Enlightenment on your system. Disabling
high quality snapshots and/or snapshots in general as well
as continuous updates can seriously improve performance -
these features are intended for high end machines.
You can resize the pager to make it the size you'd like.
Hold down ALT and use the middle-mouse button to resize
the pager in any direction. Using left-mouse button while
holding ALT and dragging will move the window. Holding
down ALT while pressing right-mouse button, just like any
normal window will get you a window operations menu.
In the default theme clicking the tab on the right side of
the pager with the arrow pointing right will shade and
unshade the pager window horizontally, allowing you to
hide and unhide the window easily.
The striped area above this tab on the pager's border is a
handle that will allow you to move the pager about, just
like the titlebar of any window.
The Iconbox
The iconbox is the place the icons for all your iconified
windows go. It is one method of recovering minimized
applications. Whenever you iconify or minimize a window
it will go into an iconbox and have an icon displayed for
it there. Clicking on the icon again will de-iconify it.
You can have as many icon boxes on your desktop as you
want to. You can create more by using the Middle Click
Menu - select Desktop->Create New Iconbox and a new
Iconbox will pop up on your desktop. Each of these
Iconboxes can have individual configurations, as detailed
on the next page.
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You can move the Iconbox around the screen using Alt-
Leftclick on the window, and then moving it to the desired
location on the screen. You can resize the Iconbox by
alt-middleclicking on the window and then adjusting the
size as described in the Mouse Bindings section.
Clicking the right-mouse button anywhere in the Iconbox
will bring up a menu to configure that iconbox. This menu
will look a little something like the one here to the
right. This menu allows you to also close the Iconbox or
open up an additional Iconbox.
To change the settings of an individual Iconbox, we'll use
the right mouse button menu and select "This Iconbox
Settings" - this should get us a dialog that looks
something like the one to our left. You can change the
orientation, icon size, scrollbar options, display policy,
base image, and many more options of the Iconbox from this
dialog. You may choose to change the anchor of alignment
for resizes - play with it until it resizes appropriately
for your Iconbox location.
If you want to customize the images used for the icons in
your iconbox, there is already an example configuration
supplied. To make your own configuration copy the
icondefs.cfg file installed in your Enlightenment system
config directory
(/usr/local/enlightenment/config/icondefs.cfg or
/usr/share/enlightenment/config/icondefs.cfg) to your
~/.enlightenment directory and then edit it. On each line
you will find 4 fields. The first field is the image file
to be used. The image is searched for in the usual search
path if it is not an absolute path to the image file. The
search path is in order: ~/.enlightenment, THEME_DIR/,
ENLIGHTENMENT_ROOT/config.
The second field on the line is a shell-glob like match
for the title of a window. If this field is irrelevant,
NULL is used instead. NB: the only valid wildcard in the
glob pattern is "*". The third field is the NAME property
of the window and the fourth is the CLASS. The order of
search priority is last to first, so the last entry in the
file that matches a window's title, name and class globs
will use the icon image defined on the first line.
If you want all windows to have an icon then use:
"pix/pimage.png" NULL NULL NULL
This is the most general match for an icon and will match
ALL windows. If you use this make sure it's at the start
of the file so it will only match if no other matches are
found.
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There are several examples of using the globbing and
matching in the system icondefs.cfg file. Use that as a
reference for your own additions.
Recovering Minimized Applications
There are several ways to recover an application once you
have minimized it. The most obvious way is to use the
Iconbox . Of course, you might have had some applications
in your Iconbox when you accidentally closed it. Or maybe
you minimized some applications and forgot you didn't have
an Iconbox. Or maybe you don't like the Iconbox and
usually use KDE or GNOME's panel to recover them and
forgot to launch them. Never fear. You can always middle
click on the Dragbar and get a menu that will allow you to
recover them. You can also Alt or Ctrl-Middleclick on the
desktop to get the same menus (in case you don't have a
Dragbar anymore).
Remember, at any time you can always create a new Iconbox
to catch your applications as they minimize, if you want
to re-enable it. Unfortunately you'll have to reconfigure
it since each Iconbox can have its own settings.
Remembering Application Properties In the window
operations menu of every window you will see an entry
labeled "Remember...". If you select this it will bring up
the "Remember" dialog for that window (Note: only one of
these dialogs can be active at any one time), as shown to
our right.
This dialog lets you selectively snapshot certain
attributes of that window at that time and have
Enlightenment remember them. You may choose to only
remember some of the attributes, and possibly not have the
application started automatically for you. Choose what you
want Enlightenment to remember about that window and hit
"Apply" or "OK" if you don't need the dialog anymore, and
Enlightenment will, the next time that instance of the
application is run, apply the current location, size,
border style or any other attribute to that window.
Enlightenment can also launch the application for you upon
startup if you so wish.
Settings When you click the right mouse button on the
desktop background you will pop up the Settings menu. From
here you can select an aspect of Enlightenment to
configure to your liking. There are too many settings to
actually document fully right now, but the likelihood is
if you want a particular behavior from Enlightenment, it
is achievable by merely playing with these options.
Combinations of options are often required to get the
effect you want, so some experimentation may be required.
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Do not be frightened. Nothing you can do can't be undone
by simply changing the options back to how they were and
clicking on Apply again.
Window Groups
Sometimes you have a number of windows on your desktop
that logically go together. Enlightenment allows you to
group windows together, so that whenever you change a
property of one window in a group, the change is reflected
on the other group members. If you have a group whose
members span multiple desktops , changing a group's
property affects only windows of that group that are on
the current desktop.
The properties that you can change for an entire group
include setting the window border, iconifying, killing,
moving, raising/lowering, sticking and shading of a
window.
To define what properties are applied to a group by
default, you go to the settings menu and pick the "Group
Settings" option, which will give you a dialog window in
which you can configure the settings, as shown here on the
right.
There are two different methods for manipulating window
groups. First, there's a comprehensive submenu available
in each window's operations menu called "Window Groups".
This menu is shown here on the right. You also are able
to configure the group individually apart from the default
group settings (as shown on the previous page).
The second way is the window titlebar, which has the most
important options directly available for convenience.
Shift-click to start a group, Ctrl-clicking to add a
window to the youngest group (also referred to as the
"current" group) and Shift-Ctrl-Click to destroying a
group. You can also click the middle mouse button for
visualizing the group(s) of a window. Click again to
returning to the previous border.
Windows can be in multiple groups at the same time, so for
many options you have to indicate which group you are
referring to. Selecting the appropriate checkboxes
(showing the group members' titles) at the top of the
dialog windows.
Selecting and Adding backgrounds
Often you will want to change the background of a
particular desktop. There are several ways you can do
this. But of course, to change your desktop, you'll need
to give Enlightenment some graphics to play with. A
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desktop theme may add a background or two to your
available selections, but most users want to have even
backgrounds to choose from. To add backgrounds to your
selection, make a backgrounds directory under your home
directory. To do this using most shells you can type
mkdir ~/.enlightenment/backgrounds
Once you've done this, you should restart Enlightenment -
this can be done quickly and easily by simply hitting the
Ctrl-Alt-End key combination. When Enlightenment starts
up, it will rescan these directories, and add new files
into the background selector.
Once you have added your backgrounds and restarted
Enlightenment, you should be able to go to the root menu
desktop selector. To get to this menu, middle click on
the desktop, select "Desktop", and go to Backgrounds. You
should get something that looks similar to the image on
the right. From here you will be able to navigate the
backgrounds menus.
(Click next for more information)
Once you have opened up the backgrounds menu, you should
see something similar to the image below. From here, you
can put your mouse over any of the images there, and it
will change the desktop background of the current desktop
to the image that you have selected.
Enlightenment will attempt to choose the best settings for
a particular background, but if it gets it wrong you can
always change the settings by hand. By bringing up the
settings menu with the right mouse button and selecting
the "Desktop Background Settings" item, you can bring up a
dialog that looks something like the one on the next page
. ..
You can use this dialog to change your background, too ,
as well as fine-tune all the various settings for each
individual background available.
Tooltips
From time to time, as you use Enlightenment, if you don't
remember what does what, if you keep the mouse still for a
little bit a tooltip will pop up. The easiest example of
this is when you hold the mouse over a Window Border.
You can disable the tooltips or change the delay before
they pop up by selecting the "Tooltip Settings" dialog
from the settings menu, as shown here on the left.
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Audio
Of course, Enlightenment comes preconfigured to play lots
of little blips and beeps when you do various things on
your desktop. In order to use sound in Enlightenment, you
must have both ESounD and audiofile installed. You can
find more information about these libraries from
http://www.gnome.org.
You can enable and/or disable sound at runtime simply by
selecting from the Settings menu the "Audio Settings"
option, which brings up a dialog, shown here at right.
Special Effects
Enlightenment has many features that are configured via
the "Special FX" settings dialog. Here you can configure
the Dragbar , various sliding speeds (including the speed
of a windowshade), as well as toggle animation of
different features. You can also configure the method
used for sliding windows, similar to resize modes .
There are several FX features disabled by default in a new
installation, including the animated display of menus.
You can also enable saveunders here, which may improve or
slow down the performance of Enlightenment on your X
server, depending on server and configuration.
Setting the Focus
Enlightenment offers lots of different options for
focusing windows. By default, it comes up in sloppy focus
mode. There are two other primary focus modes supported
by Enlightenment - click to focus and pointer focus.
Click To Focus most people are familiar with. You click
on a window and it receives the focus from Enlightenment.
Pointer Focus gives the focus to whichever window the
pointer is sitting over
Sloppy Focus is similar to Pointer Focus, except that if
you go over the desktop background you still are focused
on the last window
Next we'll tell you how to change these settings.
Enlightenment allows you to change your focus settings at
any time. Simply bring up the Settings menu and then
select "Focus Settings" to bring up a dialog that looks
something like the one on the right. At the top, we can
select between our three focus modes, as described on the
previous page.
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We can also enable some other features, such as one that
will allow a simple mouse click to raise any window to the
foreground, as well as several other advanced focus
settings.
Here we can also enable the focuslist feature. This
feature requires Xkb to be enabled in your X server. If
you don't have Xkb enabled, please consult your X server
documentation to see how to do this. The focuslist is a
window list that pops up as you cycle through your focus
using the ALT + TAB Keybinding. =head2 Moving Windows
Enlightenment comes with several different available
methods for moving a window. You can perform the actual
moves using the Window
Border, or by using the available
Mouse Bindings . This will cause the window to move until
you have released the mouse button.
To change the mode that the moving of the windows uses
(opaque being the default), open up the Settings menu, and
select "Move & Resize Settings". You can select from a
list that looks similar to the one here above-right.
Experiment until you find one that suits you best.
For some serious eyecandy, try out the Translucent move
mode. This will only work if your X server and
Enlightenment are running on the same machine, however.
Resizing Windows
Enlightenment also comes with several available methods
for resizing windows. You can perform the actual resize
on the window by clicking on any resize-handle of your
window border and dragging to the desired size. You can
also get the same effect by using the ALT + middle button
mouse binding in any part of the window.
To change the mode that the resizing of the windows uses
(opaque being the default), open up the Settings menu, and
select "Move & Resize Settings". You can select from a
list that looks similar to the one here above-right.
Experiment until you find one that suits you best.
The best eyecandy resize mode is probably technical move
mode. This mode shows you the height and width of the
window, in addition to the distance from the nearest edge.
The Window Operations Menu The Window Operations menu is a
commonly used menu that allows you to perform many
different actions onto the current window.
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The Close function closes the window in question.
Annihilate destroys the window without regard to the
application the window belongs to, which is especially
useful if the application refuses to respond to being
closed with Close.
The Iconify function iconifies the window. If you have an
Iconbox it is sent to the nearest one.
The Raise function raises the window above any windows
that may be obscuring it and Lower lowers it below windows
it is obscuring.
Shade/Unshade toggles the shaded state of the window. Note
that borderless windows are not allowed to be shaded.
Stick/Unstick toggles the sticky state of a window. A
window that is sticky remains "stuck to the glass" and
thus is visible on all virtual and multiple desktops.
Fullscreen/Window zooms in and out of the window changing
resolutions if possible. This feature will only work if
you have your X server configured correctly and it
supports the XVidtune extension. Your X server may not
like having resolutions changed - it is possible that an
unstable X server could crash if you use this. Be aware of
this when using this feature.
Remember... displays the Remember Properties dialog that
lets you select things to remember about this instance of
an application. The attributes selected to be remembered
in the state they are when you hit Apply or Ok in this
dialog. You will have to bring it up again if you wish to
remember a new state of the window.
In the Window Groups submenu there are various options for
configuring window groups and how this window relates to
any groups you may have. Note that you cannot group Pagers
windows or Iconboxes together with each other or any other
windows.
You can quickly modify the size of a window to one of
several aspects of maximum sizes using the Window Size
submenu.
Set Stacking lets you change the stacking layer of that
window.
You can change the border using the Set Border Style menu
if you wish to use a different window border. If you
change themes after you have changed the border, and the
new theme doesn't provide a border of the same name, the
window will fall back to using the DEFAULT border until
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you change it again.
Setting up E to work with KDE and GNOME Enlightenment,
though it strives to be its own desktop environment, also
supports KDE and GNOME desktop environments wherever
possible. Enlightenment comes set up to support GNOME out
of the box, in fact. To enable the KDE hints, however, you
must launch Enlightenment and then go into the "KDE
Support Settings" section of your Settings menu. From
here you can enable or disable KDE support in your copy of
Enlightenment. This setting will automatically save for
the next time you launch Enlightenment. You should be
able to launch any of KDE's or GNOME's applications and
have them supported fairly well, including (but not
limited to) the panel or kpanel, and gmc and kfm.
Please see the Frequently Asked Questions for more
information on how to set up enlightenment to work with
GNOME and KDE by default.
Window Placement and Autoraise
These two Settings dialogs allow you to configure various
options for the placement of windows. The two Dialog
window options are for windows like the ALT+O open URL
window in Netscape. Manual Placement will force you to
use the mouse to position every new window that attempts
to map itself.
The Autoraise settings Dialog will allow you to set a
timer event that causes a window to automatically raise
itself to the foreground after a set time. You can enable
it here, as well as change the timer. This is only useful
in the sloppy and pointer focus modes.
Enlightenment and IPC
Enlightenment has a fairly interesting IPC system that
allows external applications (such as Eterm) to talk to
Enlightenment and both ask for information and change
information. There is a program that was installed with
Enlightenment called "eesh" that is a simple shell
interface to the IPC in Enlightenment. It's even got its
own documentation. You can go into eesh and type "help"
and it should spit back a list of commands that it
understands.
Note: there are many commands that will show up in E's IPC
that don't necessarily work yet, or aren't fully
implemented. You CAN potentially do some really bizarre
things to your system by using eesh, but for the most part
it's just another interesting interface to E. In your
distribution package you should have received some sample
scripts written in Perl that interface to E through eesh
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showing how you can externally script E to do more things
outside E's base functionality. Expect the IPC to flesh
out even more in future revisions.
To exit eesh, hit CTRL + D (EOF)
Editing Enlightenment's Menus
The first time you run Enlightenment as a user after
you've installed it, it should create a directory under
your home directory called .enlightenment. In this
directory, there will be a file called "file.menu" - this
file controls the contents of your left-mouse button Menu
. The very first line of this file contains the title for
the menu, and the remainder of the file looks something
like this:
"Eterm" NULL exec "Eterm"
Where each column represents:
Entry title , graphic for menu (or NULL) , exec "commandline"
You may have several files in here, including a KDE menu
and a Gnome menu if Enlightenment has detected their
presence during installation. If detected, your primary
apps will be located in another file called
user_apps.menu. Each of these files is for you to edit as
desired.
Editing Your Keybindings
To set your own keybindings, all you have to do is find
the keybindings.cfg file that was installed with
Enlightenment, and make a copy in your ~/.enlightenment
directory. This file is fairly long, but shouldn't be too
difficult to edit. Be careful! The keybindings in this
file will override ALL the default keybindings, as long as
this file exists, so edit this file with extreme caution
(unless you know what you're doing).
To reset your keybindings back to the default, simply
remove this file from your ~/.enlightenment directory.
The next time you restart Enlightenment it should reload
the default keybindings into memory.
Enlightenment and Themes
One of the strong points of Enlightenment, of course, is
that you can change around the complete look and feel of
your desktop whenever you want to. Included with the
0.16.5 release are a few themes, to show off a little bit
of this configurability. You can select them by using the
middle mouse button menu , going to the "Themes" selector,
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and then choosing a new theme. Of course, there are
plenty more themes for Enlightenment than come with it by
default. You can find more by going to:
http://e.themes.org
and searching around until you find something you like.
To install a new theme is simple: all you need to do is
take the bleh.etheme file and drop it into your
~/.enlightenment/themes directory. Once you've restarted
Enlightenment, it will automatically show up in your
Themes menu, and you can choose it just like any other
theme.
Enlightenment's Eyecandy Features
Of course, Enlightenment wouldn't be complete without just
a few bits of eyecandy to play with. Access them from the
"Desktop" portion of your middle mouse button menu. There
are two toys that you can choose from:
The ripples effect - this causes little ripplets of water
to reflect on the bottom of your screen.
The waves effect - similar to ripples, but this one waves
up and down as opposed to side-to-side
Each of these can be turned back off simply by using the
same menu that you enabled it through.
Included Maintenance Scripts
Enlightenment comes with several scripts that are
executable out of the middle mouse button menu - these
scripts can perform all sorts of maintenance on the files
that Enlightenment creates automatically for you. When
you select "Maintenance" you should get a menu that looks
something like the one above-right. You can also rebuild
the KDE and GNOME menus Enlightenment uses from here
As a warning, when you purge configuration information,
the next time you restart Enlightenment it will take
longer to load. You can monitor Enlightenment's usage
using the query tools provided. If you change themes a
lot you will probably want to purge the config file cache
after you've settled on a theme. This will help keep your
disk usage by Enlightenment down.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: I can't find my Iconbox or change its settings.
A: There are two possibilities here.
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1. You don't have an Iconbox on your desktop right now.
Just middle-click and select Desktop/Create new iconbox
2. Your Iconbox is transparent and borderless. Iconify a
window and see if your icon appears. If so, rightclick on
it to reconfigure your Iconbox.
Q: I Can't Seem To Find My Left Mouse Menu
A: Your menu files may be destroyed. Try rerunning the
program that initially generated them. First you'll want
to remove the ~/.enlightenment/*.menu files. Rebuild them
using the Maintenance menu.
Q: All My Settings Are Mangled And I Can't Fix It
A: Well, if things get really messed up, you can always
remove all of Enlightenment's automatically saved files.
go into ~/.enlightenment, and remove the ...e_session*
files, and then blow away the cached directory. If your
theme is broken, remove the user_theme.cfg file, also.
The next time you start Enlightenment it should reset
everything to the default.
Q: I Upgraded My Theme, But The New One Isn't Being Used
A: When you upgrade a theme that does not come with
Enlightenment, when you go into your
~/.enlightenment/themes directory, be sure to delete the
unpacked directory version of your theme that should be
sitting next to the theme, if it is there. Otherwise when
Enlightenment attempts to start the new version it will
use the old files, which causes this problem.
Q: I set my window to borderless and can't set it back or
move it.
A: ALT + Right mouse button when pressed anywhere in the
window will give you the window operations menu. ALT +
Left mouse button will move the window and ALT + Middle
mouse button will resize the window.
Q: How can I move or resize the iconbox?
A: As described above, ALT + Right mouse button will give
you the window operations menu, ALT + Middle mouse button
will resize the iconbox and ALT+left mouse button will
move it. See the Iconbox documentation for more help
Q: How can I disable that annoying desktop tooltip?
A: There is a special config option for it under the
tooltip settings menu.
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Q: How do I set up Enlightenment to work with GNOME?
A: By default, Enlightenment supports all of the GNOME
hints. However, if you want to run GMC you may notice
that clicking on the root window does not always have the
desired effect (for dragging icons, GMC's root menus,
etc). If you want to use GMC with enlightenment, there
are a couple of options. You can use alt+leftmouse and
alt+rightmouse to use the GMC root menus. Or, you can
edit the keybindings.cfg file to remove the bindings for
your left and right mousebuttons. There is a copy of
keybindings.cfg that will do this for you that comes with
enlightenment. in /path/to/enlightenment/configs/ copy
the keybindings.gmc.cfg into your ~/.enlightenment
directory. When you restart, you will no longer have the
left and right mousebuttons bound to enlightenment. To
modify your system configuration, copy over the
keybindings.cfg file in that directory. For your
convenience, there is a keybindings.nogmc.cfg in case you
want to reverse this change at a later date. NOTE: you
may choose to use virtual areas instead of virtual
desktops since GMC does not handle clicks anywhere on the
root window on desktops other than 0. If you want to
start enlightenment from gnome-session, you should use the
gnome control-panel to select the new enlightenment as
your window manager. Warning: Enlightenment is slower
when run from a session manager. You should opt to run
enlightenment and have enlightenment be your session
manager instead of running gnome-session. You can start
"panel" and "gmc" by hand and have enlightenment relaunch
them as the preferred launch method. To do this, once you
have launched them by hand, alt-rightclick on them, select
"Remember" and then choose "Restart Application on Login".
Q: How do I set up Enlightenment to work with KDE ?
A: By default, Enlightenment does not support the KDE
hints. You can turn them on easily through your settings
menus, however. If you want to add support automatically
upon launch (which can be disabled by the autosaved user
configuration) then copy the control.kde.cfg to the
~/.enlightenment directory and rename it to control.cfg.
If you are doing this after launching enlightenment for
the first time, you will want to remove the line from your
~/.enlightenment/...e_session.XXXXXX file that looks like:
1366 0 simply remove that line and start up enlightenment
again. If your "KDE Support" settings panel still show
KDE support turned on, then you can simply check the box
there, and KDE support will remain on. You can launch
kpanel and/or kfm from your .xsession or .xinitrc files
and they will work correctly. If you want to edit the
startkde script (system-wide configuration change) find
the line that contains kwm and replace it with
/path/to/enlightenment.
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Q: These Docs Didn't Help, Where Can I Get More Help?
A: Well, we obviously can't answer all of your questions
just by predicting them, so I would try the website as
well as looking at the mailing lists , especially the mail
archives. Chances are that someone else has probably had
the same problem that you have. And if all that still
fails, you might try someone on the irc channel
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Please see our web site at http://www.enlightenment.org
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