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 0.16.4
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
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 (0.16.4) 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 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
EFnet 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 EFnet irc server
(irc.efnet.org) then join #E. For example:
BitchX your_nick irc.efnet.org
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.
CVSCommitListMail
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.
DeveloperMailingList
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.
WelcomeToEnlightenment
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 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
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.
MouseConfiguration
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
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.
ChangingWindowBorders
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.
DefaultKeybindings
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
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 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.
ChangingDesktops
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 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.
MovingApplicationsBetweenDesktops
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 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.
TheIconbox
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.
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.
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.
RecoveringMinimizedApplications
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. 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.
WindowGroups
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 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.
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.
SpecialEffects
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.
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.
ResizingWindows
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.
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 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
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.
EditingYourKeybindings
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 0.16.4
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, 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.
IncludedMaintenanceScripts
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.
FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Q: I can't find my Iconbox or change its settings.
A: There are two possibilities here.
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.
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.
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