default desktop layout To: xfce at xfce.org

[Roel van den Berg]

Hello, to add some points to the discussion, since I have spent *a
lot* of time in getting the most ergonomical setup:

"Stefan Ott" <stefan at ott.net>
> The first thing I do whenever I install Xfce is to 'merge' the two
> panels into one at the bottom, mostly because I had to do that on my
> X41's small screen and now I'm used to it, thus I would welcome such a
> setting as a new default. I'm completely against vertical panels by
> default, the reasons have been stated before (scrolling and stuff).
>

I also merge the two panels into one at the top with 18px height to
save precious space. OTOH please keep into consideration  that a
vertical bar is ergonomically easier to reach with the mouse than a
horizontal one (less muscles to move), but I understand the
disadvantages when on a *very* low reso (<1024), but isn't that the
case for lesser and lesser cases since screens come with increasing
high reso's, eg my native reso on my few-years-old laptop already has
1440x900 and my CRT has 1600x1200. On a high resoution, vertical layout
saves actually space since most sites and document-view apps dont even
use large vertical margins which is a major inefficiency imho.
But agreed, another major disadvantage for a vertical bar is that when
you have xinerama and the bar is vertically positioned at the left of
the left screen than you must move a huge distance when you are on the
right screen and vice versa, when the bar is on the right side of the
left screen than it's difficult to point to when mouse gets clipped to
the right screen when trying to point at the bar, *not* nice.
Websites with static width are slowly dying out in favor for
dynamic-width fluid layouts and firefox/iceweasel/opera etc have
pagezooming function. Old-fashioned sites that have static width mostly
are designed for 800 or 1024px width.
 
Morten Juhl-Johansen Z?lde-Fej?r 	<morten at technographer.net>
> I think vertical panels are a bit tricky to work with, because they
> (particularly the right one) almost always end up too close to the
>event
> triggers of the application you are using. So if I have to grab the
> scroll bar, close a window or some such, I might end up launching
> something instead. Not good.
> I find that the concept of utilising the corners like Vincent
> mentioned
> is sound.

True, corners are hotspots. True, buttons close to control-widgets are
not handy. Also keep in mind when using xinerama-setup with two screens
horizontally next to eachother make it less easier to reach for
instance the top-right corner when there is a screen right next to it,
(so the "corner" isn't really a corner, and is even less ease because
the mouse-cursor gets clipped on the other physsical screen wich can be
very frustrating whe used a lot in productional use.

> As you will see, I have a much narrower panel, and I have often
> wondered why the default panel size is so wide (which is also why a
> default installation of KDE looks like some sort of Fisher-Price
> Childs First Easy To Grab Toy to me).

True, KDE defaults to a very large setup like windows. I dont like
it but I can understand why the've choosen such a layout for new users.

> If there is one enhancement I should suggest (which of course is an
> enhancement to me and quite possibly not the rest of the world) is
> integrating the features of datetime/orage clock display. I really
> need
> to be able to see the date, and I have been wondering why this has to
> be an external plugin rather than built in. 

IMHO you can do this right now in 4.4 rightclicking
Orage-clock>Preferences... and adding the %code for date in the string.
Eg: %c and/or %B and/or %x

Roel vdn Berg