Features wishlist for xfce 4.1

[Benedikt Meurer]

Don Christensen wrote:
> Xan wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> Recently I became a user of xfce4. I have to say that I'm casual user 
>> yet, but I like xfce4 very much and it's modularity (so the low memory 
>> consum with the beauty of gtk and user-wanted loaded modules), and I 
>> think that with the new (mature) versions of xfce4, I will become 
>> permanent user.
>>
>> Well, I have a list of wishes for xfce4. I don't know if these are (or 
>> are planned for will be) in the next versions (I don't know that in 
>> part because I think that you have an avaliable public Release Plan or 
>> _general_ TODO list; can you do it!?).
> 
> I would also like to add that the main reason I use Xfce is the (recently
> matured) multi-head (non-Xinerama) support.  Gnome really sucks at it
> (haven't tried 2.6, though) and KDE is about 2/3 of the way there.
> Given the recent multi-head discussions here, I want to make it known
> that there are some of us out here who have proper multi-head support
> as the #1 requirement for a WM/DE environment.

The multi-head support for 4.2 is still not finished (mainly the mcs-manager 
is missing multi-head support), but its on the way.

> Actually, while I'm thinking about it, it would also be really nice to
> have a way to run multiple instances of the Xfce DE out of the same home
> directory (ie, configuration directory).  I run at least one VNC server
> on my desktop at work in addition to the console.  The console consists
> of two monitors (non-Xinerama) with different resolutions, and I run the
> VNC server at yet another resolution.  I prefer my VNC DE to be fairly
> minimal so that it is fast over a DSL connection, but my console is
> much more decorative.  Does the session manager handle this?  I would
> think not, since all of the config files would have to be managed as
> part of a session, but I haven't tried it.  I don't know best how to
> support this, but it would be nice if such support were considered
> when thinking about the design of the various components.

You can run several instances of Xfce from the same home directory, but you 
have to use another ~/.xfce4 for each of these instances. You can achieve this 
by setting the XFCE4HOME environment variable to "$HOME/.xfce4-home" and 
"$HOME/.xfce4-vnc" or whatever prior to starting xfce4-session (note, that the 
session manager does not take the XFCE4HOME variable into account any longer, 
but uses the locations mentioned by the XDG basedir spec instead, but the 
session data is saved in a per-display way).

As a side note: The new session manager provides the ability to have several 
sessions around. This offers some interesting possibilities. For example, on 
my primary notebook I have two sessions "Default" and "Work". "Default" is a 
multi-screen session which I start when I'm at home where I have a second 
monitor connected to my docking station, and "Work" is a single-screen session 
which I use when I'm at work where I have no 2nd monitor for the notebook.

HTH,
Benedikt

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