I have a mouse on my desktop: Xfce Guide

As many know I am a user of Xfce, me Desktop Environment long-time favorite for various reasons. Let's see some of them:

  1. It is not that light anymore, but it is very fast: Applications run much faster than in Gnome o KDE.
  2. Very configurable: It's very easy to customize it to your liking, and the setup is stupidly simple.
  3. Beautiful: Xfce includes your own Composition Manager, giving various elements beautiful effects without sacrificing resources.
  4. Small: Its packages are small, but it gives us a Desktop Environment fully functional and everything you need with very little.
  5. Stable: Xfce it is very stable both in operation and development.
  6. Productive: Except for Thunar (that for me you need eyelashes) Xfce it is designed to be productive.
And I have more, but they are based on my personal appreciation, so let's get to the topic at hand. How to install and configure Xfce en Debian? Although in reality, except for the installation commands, the customizing part works for any distribution of GNU / Linux.

Installation

To perform a full installation of Xfce, we must install the following packages:

$ sudo aptitude install xfce4 xfce4-goodies xfce4-artwork gvfs gvfs-backends

Latest packages (gvfs gvfs-backends) I install them to be able to use SFTP en Thunar. We can also install -in case they don't do it automatically- some extra packages:

$ sudo aptitude install thunar-thumbnailers thunar-media-tags-plugin xfce4-notifyd

Configuration

I will show you some basic things that we must know when configuring Xfce. Once we have installed Xfce and we access for the first time, we will see a message like this:

It is best to choose the option Use default settings since it will put us by default two panels with the applets needed to perform the most common desktop tasks. Knowing some things we can go from this:

to this:

The first thing we will do is delete one of the two panels: Right click on the panel »Panel» Panel Preferences.

We should get something like this:

As I have highlighted in the image, we can Add, Delete or choose a specific panel to modify it. In this case I remove the 2 Panel, which is the one that comes out at the bottom, to work on the 1 Panel. Here we can do several things:

Display:

Here we can set the orientation and dimensions of the panel, also if we want it to hide automatically or lock it on the screen.

Appearance:

In the tab Appearance We can establish a background for the panel, either an image or the one that comes by default according to the Gtk theme. As you can see in the image there is a section for the Opacity. We will see this when we have activated the Windows Composer. In the case of the example, I took the image of the background of the panel inside the folder of zukitwo, gtk theme which I use by default.

Applets:

Here we can add / remove the elements of the panel and if we double click on them, we can configure them according to their options.

When we have the panel configured as we want (something very simple) we can move it across the screen. For this we have to have the option Lock Panel of the tab Screen unchecked.

Then we can move the Panel across the screen by taking it by the corner (highlighted in yellow) with the cursor. This way we can put it Up and down or Right left.

Configuration Manager.

The other elements (and the panel inclusive) can be configured by The Configuration Manager.

It would take me a long time to explain what each thing is for, so I'm just going to show you how to use some of the options that are at the end of this article:

  • Window Manager Settings
  • Appearance
  • Desktop
  • Window Manager.
  • Session and start.

Window Manager Settings.

As I was saying, Xfce It has its own Windows Composer, where we can apply some transparency effects and others. You have many other options for working with windows, but we'll just see how to activate the effects:

As you can see, in this tab you can configure various effects. Everyone can try and adjust as they like best.

Appearance.

Here we can define that Gtk theme, Icons y Typographies we want to use. In the tab Configuration we can adjust the way the Tool Bars and whether or not we want icons in the menus.

To set the theme, it has to be located in ~ / .themes o / usr / share / themes.

Desk:

In this section we can establish our Desktop wallpaper. On the right we can choose if we want only one image, or to load a group of them randomly each time we start the session. We can also adjust the brightness and saturation of it. 😀

Here I want to highlight something important. Something that does Xfce ideal for Netbooks. On the tab Icons, we can choose some interesting options as seen in the following image:

I mean the way the icons are displayed on the desktop.

  • None: It shows none.
  • Minimized icons ...: Displays the icons of minimized applications. (Very interesting)
  • File / Launcher Icons: Show folders and so on.

Window Manager:

Xfce uses its own window manager, called xfwm. To configure the appearance of the windows we go to this option:

Window themes must go within ~ / .themes / [theme name] / xfwm/ usr / share / themes / [theme name] / xfwm. In my case I use eGtk.

Sessions and Start.

Here among other things, we can establish that Applications or Script they start with Xfce.

I think that up to here these are the main options that we must know to configure our xfce, at least for the appearance part. Now we will see some others Tips for our Xfce.

Other tips and settings.

Set cursor theme in Xfce

Those of us who are users of Xfce we know that to change the cursor theme, we just have to go to Menu »Settings» Mouse »Theme. 

But at least in my case this is not entirely effective, because in certain and certain applications, it does not show the theme selected correctly. How do we then make the cursor theme the same for the whole system?

Very simple, what we do is create in our / Home the file .xdefaults and we put the following line in it:

Xcursor.theme:Bluecurve-inverse-FC4

Where Bluecurve-inverse-FC4 is the name of the folder where the cursor theme is located.

That is, if we suppose we have a cursor theme called adwaita, which is in~ / .icons / Adwaita o / usr / share / icons / Adwaita, then the line would look like this:

Xcursor.theme:Adwaita

We restart the session and voila!

Creating a file browser for Thunar with Zenity

This article was published a long time ago in my old blog about Xfce, based on another article published in the Xubuntu blog and I leave them here again.

What we are going to do is create a file search for Thunar using zenity. The first thing we have to do is install zenity:

$ sudo aptitude install zenity

Then we open a terminal and put:

$ mkdir ~/.bash-scripts/

In this way we create a directory that will contain the script that will execute the action itself. Now we create a file called Search-for-Files inside as follows:

mousepad ~/.bash-scripts/search-for-files

and we paste this inside:

#!/bin/bash
#search-for-files
# change this figure to suit yourself -- I find zenity dies from about 1000 results but YMMV
maxresults=500
# again, change the path to the icon to suit yourself. But who doesn't like tango?
window_icon="/usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/actions/search.svg"
# this script will work for any environment that has bash and zenity, so the filemanager is entirely down to you! you can add extra arguments to the string as long as the last argument is the path of the folder you open
filemanager="thunar"
window_title="Search for Files"
srcPath="$*"
if ! [ -d "$srcPath" ] ; then
cd ~/
srcPath=`zenity --file-selection --directory --title="$window_title -- Look in folder" --window-icon="$window_icon"`
fi
if [ -d "$srcPath" ] ; then
fragment=`zenity --entry --title="$window_title -- Name contains:" --window-icon="$window_icon" --text="Search strings less than 2 characters are ignored"`
if ! [ ${#fragment} -lt 2 ] ; then
(
echo 10
O=$IFS IFS=$'\n' files=( `find "$srcPath" -iname "*$fragment*" -printf \"%Y\"\ \"%f\"\ \"%k\ KB\"\ \"%t\"\ \"%h\"\\\n | head -n $maxresults` ) IFS=$O
echo 100
selected=`eval zenity --list --title=\"${#files[@]} Files Found -- $window_title\" --window-icon="$window_icon" --width="600" --height="400" --text=\"Search results:\" --print-column=5 --column \"Type\" --column \"Name\" --column \"Size\" --column \"Date modified\" --column \"Path\" ${files[@]}`
if [ -e "$selected" ] ; then "$filemanager" "$selected" ; fi
) | zenity --progress --auto-close --pulsate --title="Searching…" --window-icon="$window_icon" --text="Searching for \"$fragment\""
fi
fi
exit

and we give it execution permissions:

chmod a+x ~/.bash-scripts/search-for-files

Now we make a backup of the uca.xml file:

$ sudo cp /etc/xdg/Thunar/uca.xml /etc/xdg/Thunar/uca.xml.old

to which we will put at the end this:

<action>
<icon>/usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/actions/search.svg</icon>
<name>Search for Files</name>
<command>bash ~/.bash-scripts/search-for-files %f</command>
<description>Search this folder for files</description>
<patterns>*</patterns>
<directories/>
</action>

Now what we have left is to open Thunar » Edit » Set up custom actions and we create a new one. And we fill in the following fields:

In the  Basic:
Name: Search
Description: Search
Command: bash ~ / .bash-scripts / search-for-files% f
Icon: We select the one we like the most.

Remaining like this:

Now in the tab Terms of use appearance the following fields:
File Pattern: *
Appears if the selection contains: Directory.

And it looks like this:

Now Thunar When we open the menu with the right click, the search option does not appear:

And if we click on it, a window will appear where we can insert the search criteria:

When we start the search we will see something like this:

and finally the result of it:

If we double-click on the result, a window of Thunar with the folder where the file is located. In this way we give our desktop much more power Xfce.

Tips: How to make Xfce look the same as KDE

The ones we use Xfce we can have the appearance of KDE (oxygen) in a very easy way, as we can see in the following image:

To achieve this we only have to download the following files:

  • For the windows (xfwm): This file. We unzip it and put it inside the folder ~ / .themes o / usr / share / themes.
  • For the topic gtkThis file. I don't remember where I downloaded it from, we unzipped it and put it inside the folder~ / .themes o / usr / share / themes.
  • For the icons: This link o this other. We unzip it and put it inside the folder~ / .icons o / usr / share / icons.

In Debian we can put the KDE icons and cursors by installing the following packages:

$ sudo aptitude install oxygencursors oxygen-icon-theme

Now we select the theme and icons in Menu »Settings» Appearance:

And in Menu »Settings» Window Manager:

Ready, with that we can have what it takes for our Xfce looks like KDE. I leave a screenshot of my desktop a while ago:

Script to restart and restore our session in Xfce

I have created version 0.1 of a simple bash Script to restart and restore the session Xfce at our whim. You can download it from  this link.

El Script allows us to make a backup of the configuration files and later restore it. The instructions are as follows:

1- We open a terminal and put:

$ wget -c http://paste.desdelinux.net/paste/?dl=43
$ mv index.html\?dl\=43 Perfil_Xfce.sh
$ chmod +x Perfil_Xfce.sh
$ ./Perfil_Xfce.sh

After executing each operation, we must exit the session and re-enter.

ChangeLog version 0.1

- Allows you to make a backup copy, which you host in ~ / .xfce4_saves /
- Allows you to restore the settings.

Known issues.

Restoring the settings loads everything as before except the panel settings. Apparently these are stored in some type directory Skeleton outside of / Home.

Put Global Proxy in LMDE Xfce

Those of us who are users of Xfce we know this excellent and minimalist Desktop Environmenthe doesn't have the same option as his older brother Gnome, to put a Global Proxy in the system.

This results in that if we use Chromium (which uses the proxy of Gnome) We shoulddeclare manually what is the proxy to use in Xfce. Well, I have already found the solution for this and it is the following.

First we edit the file / etc / environment and we put this inside:

# Proxy Global
http_proxy="http://10.10.0.5:3128"
https_proxy="http://10.10.0.5:3128"
ftp_proxy="http://10.10.0.5:3128"
no_proxy="10.10.0.0/24"

Where 10.10.0.5 is the IP of the proxy server. We save and edit the file / Etc / profile and we put at the end:

# Proxy Global
export http_proxy="http://10.10.0.5:3128"
export https_proxy="http://10.10.0.5:3128"
export ftp_proxy="http://10.10.0.5:3128"
export no_proxy="10.10.0.0/24"

We restart the equipment and we can now navigate with Chromium (for example).


44 comments, leave yours

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  1.   Alba said

    !? XFCEANDO !? That was the blog that convinced me to use xfce! ; w; every time I did something strange to my little mouse, I ran to that blog! I already said that the title sounded to me xD

    It will sound weird and half suicidal and troglodyte but… could you take the xfce from LMDE by sweeping up mint stuff and leaving pure xfce? or better I install Debian in console mode and put xfce? yes, I have nothing to do with my life, except play wii and draw xD

    1.    moskosov said

      Haven't you thought about getting a girlfriend?

      1.    Alba said

        Me? I already have a girlfriend, thanks 😀 (yes… I'm a woman and with a girlfriend> 3>) and we are both equally geeks xD we prefer to play video games: B and little by little I put her into the linux world too .w.

        1.    moskosov said

          Juajuajua I thought you were a boy, sorry for the confusion and congratulations on the girlfriend, anyway you should go for a walk in the park.

          1.    Alba said

            Valgame… does my little person look so manly? xD I have to improve that. Yes, the little monkey in my avatars is a character of mine 🙂 100 8D originality And thanks for the congratulations! ^ w ^ Gaara can verify that I am a girl since I have a photo of me on my site xD

            In the mornings I go out to exercise, I am not so mad xD and I help at home with the chores and my nieces ... but nothing for the whole afternoon xD heheheheh ~ don't worry .w.

          2.    Courage said

            Have you ever seen a guy named Alba?

          3.    moskosov said

            Ok, ok I was wrong ¬¬

    2.    Courage said

      yes, I have nothing to do with my life

      You will be a target for the word EMO just like me, the same thing happens to me

      1.    Alba said

        EMOS give a bad name to those who suffer from true depression, those of us who do nothing with our lives ... well, we are just there, spending it xD

        1.    Courage said

          Haha you still haven't seen the meaning that Elva and Sandy give to the word EMO

          1.    elav <° Linux said

            Do I have to put a link on Geekpedia, weirdo?

          2.    Courage said

            Not old, just that you have your particular meaning of that word

    3.    elav <° Linux said

      Hahahaha I am going for the second .. Install a Debian from 0 and put a mouse on the desktop 😀

      Note: Well yes, xfceando.wordpress.com was one of my babies some time ago 😀

  2.   brown said

    is it possible to have effects like compiz here? I'm interested 😉

    1.    elav <° Linux said

      They are not like Compiz's. It is more for transparencies and others. Although Xfce and Compiz get along very well 😀

    2.    Courage said

      Well, man I think that with that the grace of XFCE is lost

      That is not something light and as the acronym XFCE says:

      X Free Ccholesterol Eenvironment

    3.    Drakon said

      If possible: D.

  3.   perseus said

    I look very cute, the best of "both worlds", the art of KDE and the simplicity of XFCE, excellent ...

    1.    Courage said

      And also that has been done by a guy who only uses KDE from time to time so that the gritty does not touch his balls

      1.    perseus said

        XD, posted from CrunchBang 😛

  4.   Miguel said

    Also if you don't like xfwm, you can change it to a lighter one like openbox (run "openbox –replace") or a heavier one like metacity (the same, "metacity –replace". In my case, I use the latter and it works quite well .
    regards

  5.   oleksis said

    Very good, finally 🙂. I repeat that this type of entry and more, the guides had to also add a document such as PDF to download it.

    Greetings and we read!

  6.   Oscar said

    Thank you elav, Mission Accomplished +100

  7.   Javi hyuga said

    Many thanks. Now I'm looking for a little bit to reinstall Linux on the desktop and I was thinking of trying chakra with its magnificent KDE, but thanks to your post, I think I'll try the other idea that was on my mind: Debian (I don't know what it has, but I feel bad if I don't have him on the PC xD) with XFCE, let's see if following your advice I'll leave it 100% to my liking. Thank you very much for this blog.

    1.    elav <° Linux said

      Hahahaha welcome Javi:
      Well, nothing man, you will tell us how you have been 😀

  8.   moskosov said

    10 points for the guide I am delighted to you, for 3 months I have installed linux mint on a pendrive and with gnome it was re-slowing yesterday it put XFCE and it has improved performance, so this guide suits me like a glove. Thank you

  9.   giskard said

    Excellent guide !!! Congratulations 🙂

    I returned to Xubuntu after Canonical tried to impose Unity on me, and since my computer is not a tablet, that does not work for me. With XFCE 4.8 I'm doing great. They have improved it a lot. Let's wait for 4.10 next year to see how it looks.

    1.    giskard said

      Oh, and by the way, I agree with you: Thunar NEEDS TABS. Say what they say out there.

      1.    Hache said

        I completely agree. It is the only reason I use Pcmanfm.

      2.    elav <° Linux said

        The other day in the list of Xfce developers I dropped this little message:

        Evolution by God !!! Evolution .. How long will we be living in the past?

        They continue with the idea that if Xfce is designed to be simple, that if to be light. Don't you realize that it is not so much the second, and that Thunar needs tabs for the first?

        1.    KZKG ^ Gaara <"Linux said

          I imagine they see it from this point of view:
          «If we give in and load Thunar with tabs, then we will not stop and will continue to make everything more comfortable by loading the environment, and Xfce will lose what characterizes it, low consumption and pleasant appearance, that is, a middle ground«

  10.   jhals said

    What else could you expect from a big one like elav xD

    Excellent guide brother, to see if I continue evangelizing people for Linux using this blog and its forum, as a reference of impeccable work and with good vibes.

    regards

    1.    elav <° Linux said

      Thanks man, but come on, it's not that bad
      -.- '

  11.   Mauricio said

    Excellent, I've been thinking about installing Arch with XFCE for days. I had Xubuntu on a PC a while ago and I was loving it. Then I decided to try Unity, when 11.04 came out, and I really liked it (I think I was one of the few), but I have always been a bit busted that Ubuntu comes so loaded with demons and useless applications that you cannot eliminate without loading half OS. So as soon as I have a vacation, I am leaving with Arch and XFCE. So I'm going to bookmark this tutorial. 😀

  12.   Nonamed said

    thanks for such an extensive guide

    what thunar lacks is a decent search tool like nautilus, or better viewing of files with long names, just like nautilus does

    I stick with nautilus (using xfce)

    interesting the detail of the mouse pointer creating the file

  13.   zOdiaK said

    The guide is excellent, maybe I am encouraged by Xfce! Thank you very much, all this is very interesting, I like it.

    Regards!

  14.   gabriel said

    really good.

  15.   eltbo said

    Hello elav, I have been a user of xfce for quite some time, and although several do not like unity of ubuntu, I have it customized with a similar appearance: P. First, the guide is super good for those who want to get started in the world of the little mouse, and secondly, I wanted to ask you for a link to download the theme for xfwm from egtk, which I can't find anywhere.

    regards

    1.    elav <° Linux said

      Welcome eltbo:
      Thank you very much for the guide. The eGTK theme can be found complete for Gnome + Xfce in the profile DanRabbit on Deviantart.

      regards

      1.    eltbo said

        What an idiot, it had not occurred to me to look at the elementary devianart page …….

        THANK YOU

  16.   xfraniux said

    What is the reason to create a global proxy ??? If you could explain it to me better, I would appreciate it.

    regards

  17.   Danny said

    Good guide, neither gnome 3, nor unity, nor kde convince me ... let's see what this is up, the truth is I was comfortable with gnome 2 and I thought that version 3 would aim to add functionality by simplifying certain things but no, they They had to change everything, including what I chose them for.

  18.   The Sandman said

    Hello, the guide is very useful, I came a while ago denying with Gnome 3, Cinnamon and Mate in Linux Mint 12, and yesterday I decided to try Xfce, and the truth is I am impressed with the agility with which everything works, and I really liked the Xfwm effects. And I'm toying with the idea of ​​reviving a somewhat old team with Debian + Xfce, let's see what comes out, heh. Greetings from Argentina.

  19.   Leo said

    Very good info. TO XFCE I would not change it for anything. And it is true that Thunar needs tabs, so I changed it to PcmanFM and it was a gem. But the environment is insurmountable 🙂