mars

Xfce

Desktop environment

xfce4-about --version

xfce4-about 4.18.6 (Xfce 4.18)

Copyright (c) 2008-2024
The Xfce development team. All rights reserved.

Please report bugs to <https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/libxfce4ui/-/issues>.

Components

In the UNIX-small-tools spirit, the “Xfce desktop environment” is a collection of programs that provides a full-featured desktop environment.

Xfce used to stand for something, an acronymn, whose expansion no longer has any relevance, so “Xfce” just means itself now.

Descriptions taken from xfce4-about and the Xfce about page.

These binaries can be run individually. e.g. xfce4-about & to show the about menu, xfdesktop --windowlist to show open windows etc.

Window manager (xfwm4): Handles the placement of windows on screen, provides window decorations and manages workspaces.
Desktop manager (xfdesktop): Sets the background image and provides a root window menu, desktop icons or minimized icons and a window list.
Panel (xfce4-panel): Switch between open windows, launch applications, switch workspaces and use menu plugins to browse programs and directories.
Session manager (xfce4-session): Controls login and power management, saves and restores sessions.

Session manager `xfce4-session`

man xfce4-session

The xfce4-session program starts up the Xfce Desktop Environment and is typically executed by your login manager (e.g. xdm, gdm, kdm, wdm or from your X startup scripts). It will load your last session or a default session that includes the standard Xfce programs if no saved session is available.

xfce4-session is a standard X11R6 session manager than can manage any X11R6 session manager compliant program, including gnome and KDE programs.

xfce4-session uses the contents of the ~/.cache/sessions directory for starting previously saved sessions.

ls ~/.cache/sessions

xfce4-session-localhost:0
xfwm4-26b706f01-8fc9-4136-a5de-c7a189e18e56.state

ls ~/.cache/sessions/thumbs*

Default.png

Default.png is a small 256x160px screenshot of the desktop and running applications (seems stale, perhaps at the point the session was saved).

xfce4-session-localhost:0, where presumably :0 stands for the X display number, is a text file containing an entry for all the running programs.

cat ~/.cache/sessions/xfce4-session-localhost:0 | awk 'NR < 9 || NR > 63 { print }; NR == 63 { print "..." }'

[Session: Default]
Client0_ClientId=26b706f01-8fc9-4136-a5de-c7a189e18e56
Client0_Hostname=unix/localhost
Client0_CloneCommand=xfwm4,
Client0_DiscardCommand=rm,-rf,/home/m/.cache/sessions/xfwm4-26b706f01-8fc9-4136-a5de-c7a189e18e56.state,
Client0_RestartCommand=xfwm4,--display,:0.0,--sm-client-id,26b706f01-8fc9-4136-a5de-c7a189e18e56,
Client0_CurrentDirectory=/home/m
Client0_Program=xfwm4
...
Client6_DesktopFile=/usr/share/applications/xfce4-terminal.desktop
Client6_Program=xfce4-terminal
Client6_UserId=m
Client6_Priority=50
Client6_RestartStyleHint=0
Count=7
LegacyCount=0
Screen0_ActiveWorkspace=0
LastAccess=1748618509

Similarly, but differently, the xfwm4-<uuid>.state file is a text file containing details about all open windows.

cat ~/.cache/sessions/xfwm4-*.state

[CLIENT] 0x800003
  [CLIENT_ID] 2cab7566f-86f4-426d-82c3-8edfc5ee80d9
  [CLIENT_LEADER] 0x800001
  [WINDOW_ROLE] xfce4-terminal-1748614300-1539522888
  [RES_NAME] xfce4-terminal
  [RES_CLASS] Xfce4-terminal
  [WM_NAME] Terminal
  [WM_COMMAND] (1) "xfce4-terminal"
  [GEOMETRY] (127,91,817,483)
  [GEOMETRY-MAXIMIZED] (127,91,817,483)
  [SCREEN] 0
  [DESK] 0
  [FLAGS] 0x0
[CLIENT] 0x800216
  [CLIENT_ID] 2cab7566f-86f4-426d-82c3-8edfc5ee80d9
  [CLIENT_LEADER] 0x800001
  [WINDOW_ROLE] xfce4-terminal-1748614362-2333586391
  [RES_NAME] xfce4-terminal
  [RES_CLASS] Xfce4-terminal
  [WM_NAME] Terminal -
  [WM_COMMAND] (1) "xfce4-terminal"
  [GEOMETRY] (618,412,817,483)
  [GEOMETRY-MAXIMIZED] (618,412,817,483)
  [SCREEN] 0
  [DESK] 0
  [FLAGS] 0x10000

More details about xfce4-session are available in the Xfce online manuals:

https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-session

Xfce4-session is a session manager for Xfce. Its task is to save the state of your desktop (opened applications and their location) and restore it during a next startup. You can create several different sessions and choose one of them on startup.

To ask xfce4-session to automatically save the session on logout (including shutdown),

xfconf-query -c xfce4-session -p /general/SaveOnExit -t bool -ns true

Window manager

Tips

Shading (and unshading) a window, or rolling it up to hide its contents and only show the title bar, can be done by scrolling the mouse wheel when hovering over the title bar.

Display Manager

Who starts Xfce?

Running Xfce

Display managers

xfce4-session installs a file that should add an option for display managers to run an Xfce session. Xfce does not have its own DM.

Commandline

startxfce4

In the case of alpine when using setup-desktop with the xfce option, the display manager is lightdm.

Lightdm then would start xfce4-session, which would in turn

When you start the Xfce session for the first time, several programs are started by the Xfce session manager.

Panel

Desktop manager

Window manager

Settings manager.

The Xfce session manager manages the startup of applications, and also allows you to save your session when you quit Xfce, so that the next time you log in, the same programs are started for you automatically.

We can see this in the following (ellided) output of pstree

init-+...
     |-elogind-daemon
     |-7*[getty]
     |-supervise-daem--lightdm-+-Xorg---{InputThread}
			       |-lightdm-+-xfce4-session-+-Thunar
							 |-xfce4-panel
							 |-xfce4-power-man
							 |-xfce4-screensav
							 |-xfce4-terminal
							 |-xfdesktop
							 |-xfsettingsd
							 |-xfwm4

Components II

Settings manager (xfce4-settings): A pseudo component which is made up of a daemon, manager and editor to centralize the configuration management.
Application finder (xfce4-appfinder): Alt-F2 to launch applications.
Thunar (thunar): File manager.

App finder `xfce4-appfinder`

The Xfce panel can be used to access programs by means of launchers, these program launchers are displayed as icons on the panel to launch the specified program. The Applications Menu item on the panel also contains all installed programs.

Application finder (Alt-F2 or chose “Run Program…” from the Application or Desktop Menu) can be used to launch programs by name.

By default, the xfce4-session will start an instance of xfce4-appfinder (as a child of xfsettingsd and keep it running in the background for fast access, reusing it for invocations.

See App Finder 2 below for configuration.

Thunar

File manager, named after the German god of Thunder (who is apparently the same entity as the more widely known Norse god Thor).

thunar without arguments does the same thing as exo-open ., opening the current folder in the file manager.

ls -lh `which thunar` `which Thunar`

lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           6 May 17 17:01 /usr/bin/Thunar -> thunar
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root      777.9K Jul 31  2024 /usr/bin/thunar

exo-open

“exo-open is the CLI interface to the Xfce Preferred Applications framework”.

exo-open ~ - File URLs open in Thunar.
exo-open https://mnvr.in - HTTPS URLs open in the default web browser.
exo-open --launch WebBrowser mnvr.in - We all need a little help sometimes, like exo-open does for URLs without a scheme.

Keyboard shortcuts

xfce4-keyboard-settings &

Thunar - Super + E (what’s Super?)
Appfinder - Super + R
xfce4-session-logout - Ctrl + Alt + Delete (Requires Fn on MacBook keyboards)

xfwm4

Window manager.

M-tab - Cycle through windows.

By default, cycling shows a preview of the window. This can be turned off by in Window Manager Tweaks > Compositor by disabling the “Show window previews in place of windows when cycling”.

xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/cycle_preview -t bool -ns false

This leaves us with a compact horizontal icon switcher.

Alternatively, vertical list based view can be enabled under Window Manager Tweaks > Cycling by enabling the “Cycle through windows in a list” option.

xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/cycle_tabwin_mode -n -t int -ns 1

M-space brings up the window operations menu.
C-M-d - Show desktop.
M-F4 - Close window.

Workspaces

The number of workspaces can be reduced from 4 to 1 by

xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/workspace_count -n -t int -ns 1

And margins added to the screen edges. The window manager will not place new windows in the margins, but we can still manually move them there. The values are in pixels.

xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/margin_top -n -t int -ns 10
xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/margin_bottom -n -t int -ns 50
xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/margin_left -n -t int -ns 10
xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/margin_right -n -t int -ns 10

These margins are also in effect when maximizing the window, which is a bit unfortunate, but fortunately that’s not something I need to do often.

xfce4-desktop

Desktop. The thing that shows the background, and houses the “desktop” icons.

Changing the wallpaper

xfconf-query --channel xfce4-desktop \
  --property '/backdrop/screen0/monitorVirtual-1/workspace0/last-image' \
  --type string --create --set '/home/m/Downloads/pattern.svg'

Reset it using --reset.

The desktop program displays a static background image by default, because that is what it is programmed to do. We are programmers, we can reprogram it to show anything we want.

To hide the icons from the desktop,

xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p /desktop-icons/style -t int -ns 0

Theme

From the Xfce wiki:

There are 5 different themes you can adjust in Xfce:

Window decorations,

GTK interfaces,

Cursors,

Notifications,

Icons.

Window decoration themes go to ~/.local/share/themes/<theme_name>/xfwm4 and can be selected in Window Manager settings.

GTK themes theme the toolkit (buttons, textfields, etc). These go in ~/.local/share/themes/<theme_name>/gtk-3.0 and can be selected in Appearance settings.

Cursor and icons go to ~/.icons/<theme_name>.

System wide variants for all live in /usr/share/{themes,icons}.

Defaults

The Window Manager decoration theme:

xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/theme

Default

“Default” is both a xfwm4 and GTK-3 theme

find /usr/share/themes/ -mindepth 2 -type d

/usr/share/themes/Default-hdpi/xfwm4
/usr/share/themes/Default/xfwm4
/usr/share/themes/Default/gtk-3.0
/usr/share/themes/Moheli/xfwm4
/usr/share/themes/Daloa/xfwm4
/usr/share/themes/Emacs/gtk-3.0
/usr/share/themes/Kokodi/xfwm4
/usr/share/themes/Default-xhdpi/xfwm4

The (current, Xfce 4.20) default GTK theme is Adwaita, and so is the icon theme. No cursor theme seems to be explicitly set.

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/ThemeName; \
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/IconThemeName; \
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Gtk/CursorThemeName

Adwaita
Adwaita

Dark mode

“Dark mode” is just switching to a “dark” GTK variant the GTK theme. These are identified by the -dark suffix.

Firefox will automatically use the current GTK theme mode.

This switch can be scripted by using xfconf-query to set xsettings/Net/ThemeName. Arch wiki lists more options.

Installing

From alpinelinux.org/wiki/Xfce:

It is necessary to add some theme files, to get a proper (themed) appearance. By default, there is no theme and Adwaita icon in Appearance settings, but Adwaita is missing some icons for Xfce.

Install adw-gtk3 package for basic themes and adwaita-xfce-icon-theme package for basic icons.

These packages seem to be already transitively installed (?), they show up in apk info. But they don’t show up in Appearance settings, and an explicit install is needed.

apk add adwaita-xfce-icon-theme adw-gtk3

Now they show up in Appearance settings, and can be selected.

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/ThemeName -t string -ns adw-gtk3
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/IconThemeName -t string -ns adwaita-xfce

The “Set matching Xfwm4 theme if there is one” toggle can be enabled to also switch the Window Decorations theme that goes along with the theme (if any).

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xfce/SyncThemes -t bool -ns true

Also disable the panel dark mode, so that it follows the system theme.

xfconf-query -c xfce4-panel -p /panels/dark-mode -t bool -ns false

Adwaita, adwaita

The default fallback theme, “Adwaita”, comes with GTK3. The ones we just installed have similar but different name, “adw-gtk3” and “adw-gtk3-dark”, and are also visually different (See also: Xfce forum - Theme confusion

There is no option in the Appearance settings to go back to the default, but it can be done by resetting the value using xfconf.

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/ThemeName -r

Workaround for Adwaita Light

Unfortunately, currently (Xfce 4.20) there is bug preventing the Adwaita light mode from being usable (Xfce forum - Xfce doesn’t apply Adwaita white theme)

As a workaround, copy the upstream theme from /usr/share/themes/adw-gtk, rename the variant in index.theme, and remove gtk-3.0/gtk-dark.css.

As a even simpler workaround, set the theme to adw-gtk. This name is incorrect, it should be “adw-gtk3” (for the light theme), but it seems to work for reasons that I don’t understand.

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/ThemeName -t string -ns adw-gtk

Exo

Exo is an Xfce internal library. As a user, we know of its existence in two ways:

exo-desktop-item-edit, an editor for .desktop files
exo-open, Xfce’s xdg-open.

App Finder 2

Default keybindings are Alt-F2 (compact) and Alt-F3 (expanded).

Super-R is a more convenient invocation, but it launches in compact mode where auto complete doesn’t seem to work. Remap the key to expanded by removing the “-c” argument.

xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts -p '/commands/custom/<Super>r' -t string -ns 'xfce4-appfinder'

Tweaks.

xfconf-query -c xfce4-appfinder -p /single-click-execute -t bool -ns true
xfconf-query -c xfce4-appfinder -p /sort-by-frecency -t bool -ns true
xfconf-query -c xfce4-appfinder -p /icon-view -t bool -ns true
xfconf-query -c xfce4-appfinder -p /text-beside-icons -t bool -ns true
xfconf-query -c xfce4-appfinder -p /remember-category -t bool -ns true
xfconf-query -c xfce4-appfinder -p /always-center -t bool -ns false
xfconf-query -c xfce4-appfinder -p /hide-category-pane -t bool -ns false

Panel

The panel(s) are customizable, but the format isn’t easily to change using commands. Customizing it using the settings app, stashing the resultant ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-panel.xml and replacing it when not logged in simplest approach I’ve found.

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