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A very minimal desktop
I discovered a really nifty trick the other day, one that makes for a pleasant work environment and that fills the need for a launch area of some kind. It basically eliminates the need for iDesk, too.
While you may be aware that Xfce can draw the usual home, trash, and volume folders directly on the desktop, it can also do things with the icons on the desktop. Like . . . use them as application launchers.
Open up a browser, and drag a .desktop entry from /usr/share/applications onto the desktop. Presto, there's your application launcher. Much larger than the usual miniscule panel icon sizes, too. The downside is that you can't drag items directly from your Xfce menu, but as long as you know where they come from, you can add any launcher you want. A bit of tinkering results in the following:
Who needs a panel, when the desktop launchers, right-click desktop menu, and keyboard commands work just fine? Unless you really need one, of course. It's almost like the ever-popular spartan Openbox + iDesk combination. Xfce distilled to its finest essence. Thank goodness for flexibility.
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4 comments
Well, I imagine most keyboard jockeys don't have to worry about sorting windows, as they already have fast ways of getting to the window they want, something besides the good ol' alt-tab. I imagine dmenu would be even handier.
I notice that when I have a lot of windows open, the panel starts getting more and more useless, since the taskbar rapidly runs out of room to display each task legibly.
This setup is really more of an experiment than anything else; a way to test how well desktop icon launching works. I think for it to be most effective, a reserved space would have to be put in place at the top of the screen, something that always shows at least part of the icons. In other words . . . a panel-like space.
I normally run with a single panel and several launcher icons, but the panel really does get crowded, given all the other things like trays, sensors-applets, status scripts, etc. You can see my usual setup in my other screenshots: http://dev.gentoo.org/~nightmorph/misc/screens
IMO, the more you can see what you must see (programs you're working in) and the less you see what you don't really need (window list, launchers, ..) the more useful and less distracting a desktop is.
Like Colin I don't keep launchers on my Desktop (in fact I keep almost nothing there) because I almost never see the desktop. I keep my panels as clean as possible too. For launching programs I rely on gnome-do as much as I can, and who needs window lists when you *know* which apps you have open, only an alt-tab or virtual desktop away...
I will take a good look at dmenu, it looks pretty cool. Curious how it compares to gnome-do.
my desktop is clean except for awn. starting apps works with hotkeys, gmrun (or gnome-do) and sometimes the menu
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