advice: xfce and its panel are difficult to separate

[imschmeg]

For anyone trying an alternate panel or dock solution for xfce - a word of caution: Running Xfce (xfwm4) without a running xfce4-panel presents some difficulties. The following commands all produce errors:

xfce4-popup-applicationsmenu
xfce4-popup-whiskermenu
xfce4-popup-directorymenu

so one can't merely bind those to launchers or buttons in other panels/docs/taskbars, or even to keyboard shortcuts, unless xfce4-panel is running. However, xfce4-popup-applicationsmenu, after popping up an error window, will proceed to popup the applications menu (which can still be reached by right clicking on the desktop as well, without any errors).

The errors tend to look like this:

Code: Select all

$ xfce4-popup-windowmenu

(xfce4-panel:31896): dbind-WARNING **: 18:25:49.777: Couldn't connect to accessibility bus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-qMJFTvT66X: Connection refused

All of those errors disappear with a xfce4-panel running. If you'd rather use a different panel, it may be worth keeping an invisible/empty xfce4-panel around just to pacify those other commands (an experiment I will try soon...)

At least, this has been my experience when trying to use a tint2 panel with xfce.

[SwampRabbit]

This is because at least whiskermenu is a panel plugin, not a standalone application. I don't know off the top of my head, but applicationsmenu and directorymenu might need the panel too.

Folks that try to use the whisker menu with plank do that same thing.

Gnome and Mate have some really cool universal menus now, but those also rely on the Gnome and Mate panel from what I am tracking.

[asqwerth]

For plank, you could add the xfce4-appfinder program as a launcher. It looks a lot like whisker but is a program on its own, not a panel plugin.

[SwampRabbit]

For plank, you could add the xfce4-appfinder program as a launcher. It looks a lot like whisker but is a program on its own, not a panel plugin.

Yeah that is a very good option. I use an xfce-appfinder launcher in the Xfce panel on a tablet I have MX installed on, it opens full screen. It is way easier than trying to use the Whisker menu with a finger.

[Beratung]

I dunno, goofed around with about half a dozen different panels during the past 10 years, but for sheer speed & efficiency I always ended up returning to XFCE panels since I found those to be the most customizable of all of them. To each their own of course, but I stuck with XFCE panels now for the past 2+ years. It's pretty amazing what XFCE allows you to do with those panels, once you become a little familiar with how they work.
(especially making invisible panels, multiple panels, and placement anywhere ... that's just way cool)

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panel-leftside.jpg

panel-rightside.jpg

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[imschmeg]

My mistake about the errors. The real annoying thing is the popups with the errors (like the attached), not the console errors.

Also, even though those xfce4-popup... commands are problematic, the following ones are not so long as xfdesktop is running:

Code: Select all

xfdesktop --menu
xfdesktop --windowlist

and, as was pointed out, xfce4-appfinder. So, much less problematic that I led myself to believe.

I also find that xfce4-panel is plenty customizable, but I was trying out tint2 for portability, and trying to make my tint2 panel as much like my existing xfce4 panel as possible. I wanted similar appearance in other WMs, such as fluxbox. I am scripting the mouse clicks to choose menus based on which WM/DM as well:

Code: Select all

#!/usr/bin/bash --norc

B=$1 # which button

if pidof fluxbox; then
	case $B in
		left) fluxbox-remote 'CustomMenu ~/.fluxbox/custom-menu';;
		middle) fluxbox-remote 'WorkspaceMenu';;
		right) fluxbox-remote 'RootMenu';;
	esac
elif pidof xfdesktop; then
	case $B in
		left) xfce4-appfinder --disable-server;;
		middle) xfdesktop --windowlist;;
		right) xfdesktop --menu;;
	esac
fi

As I try out other alternative WMs/DMs, I'll add to that.

[Beratung]

I believe it's part of MX Tools, but there's actually a way for you to save all of the panel settings as a file. That file can then be movied to another user or even another similar machine and as long as the same version of XFCE is running there, those panel settings can then be imported to the XFCE on that other user account or machine. The feature has actually been around for years, but for some reason it's never been ported to the regular XFCE settings where a user would find it right away.

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[manyroads]

You can also try using menu/panels frequently used for tilers and stacking wms... like jgmenu/rofi with tint2 and/or ploybar/lemonbar/ybar etc.