Desktop-ish
Posted: Saturday 31st December 2022 3:16pm
I've been working on my Desktop-ish launcher.
It's probably got a bug or 2 but has been through many changes fixes/
What is it?
Essentially a launcher application designed to show folders containing mostly .desktop icons.
Why was it made?
I didn't like some of the desktops like a gnome variant i used that did not have/support the Desktop folder so it initially was made to just show the items in the Desktop folder.
What does it do now?
It's had many mods, it's all a bit WIP still but some of the features are..
* Shows either or both a Desktop style panel (double click icons that have text) and a panel style panel (single click items without text)
(see the clip below, Desktop-ish is running on the lower part of the screen)
* Directories for both panels can be manually set
* many color customisations for your best look.
* has a fairly crude hand made start menu.
* settings are save individually for different desktop types like MATE, Gnome, etc
* Edits to .desktop Actions take effect right away.
Special features for gambas coders...
* A Gambas IDE icon will show the recent projects list and also offer to load the ide with any toolkit.
* A gambas IDE icon gets a "Copy system info to clipboard" option for the BugTracker.
* ALL launchers for gambas programs that reside in their project folders have an option to open in the IDE
Other Features.
* All icons have "Run as root" option
* has a built in .desktop file editor that edits Actions too. (right click icon options)
* .desktop file editor can auto-add Actions to run executable with alternative toolkits and to open project in the IDE
Latest cool feature is allowing icons to have a "Recent" list to open recently opened files.
Recents are added manually by reading the programs recent data and turning it into a list of paths.
The recent data file scanned can be used directly or converted using a script.
See this clip to see how the recents function is working for my text editor ScriptEd and for FireFox and for my GitMan program
ScriptEd stores it's recent list as a file containing just a list of file paths so i use "Direct" mode on the file that simply reads it.
FireFox saves history in a sqlite file so i use a gambas script to run sqlite3 command and process the output into a list of url's.
GitMan saves in a gambas config file so i use a script to extract the data.
(this was version 1, scroll down to find latest version 3)
It's probably got a bug or 2 but has been through many changes fixes/
What is it?
Essentially a launcher application designed to show folders containing mostly .desktop icons.
Why was it made?
I didn't like some of the desktops like a gnome variant i used that did not have/support the Desktop folder so it initially was made to just show the items in the Desktop folder.
What does it do now?
It's had many mods, it's all a bit WIP still but some of the features are..
* Shows either or both a Desktop style panel (double click icons that have text) and a panel style panel (single click items without text)
(see the clip below, Desktop-ish is running on the lower part of the screen)
* Directories for both panels can be manually set
* many color customisations for your best look.
* has a fairly crude hand made start menu.
* settings are save individually for different desktop types like MATE, Gnome, etc
* Edits to .desktop Actions take effect right away.
Special features for gambas coders...
* A Gambas IDE icon will show the recent projects list and also offer to load the ide with any toolkit.
* A gambas IDE icon gets a "Copy system info to clipboard" option for the BugTracker.
* ALL launchers for gambas programs that reside in their project folders have an option to open in the IDE
Other Features.
* All icons have "Run as root" option
* has a built in .desktop file editor that edits Actions too. (right click icon options)
* .desktop file editor can auto-add Actions to run executable with alternative toolkits and to open project in the IDE
Latest cool feature is allowing icons to have a "Recent" list to open recently opened files.
Recents are added manually by reading the programs recent data and turning it into a list of paths.
The recent data file scanned can be used directly or converted using a script.
See this clip to see how the recents function is working for my text editor ScriptEd and for FireFox and for my GitMan program
ScriptEd stores it's recent list as a file containing just a list of file paths so i use "Direct" mode on the file that simply reads it.
FireFox saves history in a sqlite file so i use a gambas script to run sqlite3 command and process the output into a list of url's.
GitMan saves in a gambas config file so i use a script to extract the data.
(this was version 1, scroll down to find latest version 3)