Windows, How To Work Them
Each application running in KDE has its own window, and some applications may use more than one window. You can manipulate these windows in many ways to make your desktop work for you. Here is a normal window:
If you want to use a window, it must be active. A window
automatically becomes active when you open it, so that the application
you opened is immediately ready to use. Only one window can be active
at a time. The active window is the one into which you can type, and can
be distinguished from the others because it has a different colored
titlebar. (With the KDE default theme, the active window has a
light blue titlebar, and the inactive
windows have gray titlebars.)
When you want to work in a different window, you need to make it active. There are two ways to do this:
mouse button-click on the window that you want to make active. The window will become active and will be raised above other windows if it overlaps them.
Hold down Alt and press Tab (do not release the Alt key). A popup dialog appears with a list of available windows, one of which is highlighted. You can select a different window by pressing Tab again to move through the list, all the time holding down Alt. When you release the Alt key, the window which was highlighted is made active.
The first way to organize the windows on your desktop is to move them around. You can move windows so that they overlap other windows, or so that you can see the whole window. There are three ways to move a window:
Click the mouse button on the window titlebar and hold it down. Move the mouse cursor and the window moves with it. Release the mouse button, and the window remains where you left it.
Open the window menu using the leftmost button on the window titlebar (as displayed below), and select . The mouse cursor moves to the center of the current window and by moving the mouse around, you can move the window. Once you have moved the window to the position you want, click the mouse button to release it.
Hold down Alt and the mouse button when the mouse cursor is above the window you want to move. The mouse cursor changes to a compass, and by moving the mouse, you can move the window. Just release the mouse button to release the window. This method is particularly useful if the window titlebar has been moved off the screen, so you cannot use the other methods.
You can make windows bigger or smaller, wider, or taller in one of two ways. Just use whichever you are most comfortable with:
Move the mouse cursor over the border of the window (it is light blue in the screenshot above). The pointer will turn into a double-headed arrow. Click and drag, and the edge of the window follows the mouse cursor, making the window bigger or smaller. If you click on the borders on the top or bottom of the window, you can adjust the height on its own. If you click on the borders on the left or right of the window, you can adjust the width. To change both at the same time, move the mouse cursor over the corner of the window. When the pointer becomes a diagonal double-headed arrow, click and drag.
Use the leftmost button on the window titlebar to display the window menu. Choose the entry, and the mouse pointer will become a double-headed arrow. Move the mouse cursor around to resize, and click the mouse button when you are done to release the window.
If you cannot see the window border or the button for the window menu, you can use Alt and the mouse button: Hold down Alt and drag with the mouse button. The window will resize. You just release the mouse button when you are done.
If you just want to make a window as big as possible, so it takes up the whole screen, use the button, which is the second button from the right on the window titlebar. Clicking with the mouse button on this button will make the window as big as possible in both directions; while clicking with the mouse button or the mouse button will increase the window's size in only the vertical or horizontal direction, respectively.
When you need to keep a program open, but you do not want it to take up space on your desktop, you can minimize it or shade it. To minimize a window, click the button, which is third from the right on the window titlebar. The window will not be displayed, but the program is still running, and an entry for it appears in the taskbar on the panel. To display the window again, click on its entry in the taskbar. You can also use Alt+Tab: see the section called “Switching Between Windows”.
Shading windows is very similar to minimizing them, but this time, only the titlebar of the window is shown. To shade a window, double-click on the titlebar. To restore the window, just double-click on the titlebar again.
Sometimes you might have a whole lot of windows open and all over the place. By selecting to cascade windows KDE will automatically line them up as a succession from the top-left of your screen. To use this option use your mouse button on the desktop, and then select .
By selecting to unclutter your opened windows KDE will attempt to use the maximum available space of the desktop in order to display as much of each window as possible. For example, should you have four windows open and you request that they be uncluttered, they will each be placed in a corner of the desktop, regardless of where they were originally. To use this option once again use your mouse button on the desktop and then select .
When you finish using an application, you will want to stop the application and close its window. Once again, you have the choice of a few options:
Click on the rightmost button on the window titlebar. If you are editing a document with that application, you will be asked whether you want to your changes, them, or your command to close the application.
Use the -> option on the menubar. You will be presented with the same choice of , , or .
-click on the respective window in Kicker, the KDE panel, and then select . You will be prompted with an option to save any documents that were being edited.
Press Alt+F4 . Once again, the confirmation dialog will be shown if you were editing any documents.
kstart
The simplest way to access the advanced window management facilities in KDE is to use a little known utility called kstart, which is included in KDE since version 2.1 kstart lets you control the way an application interacts with the window manager. The command is usually used to define special behavior for commonly-used applications, but it can also be useful for integrating non-KDE applications into your desktop.
Using kstart is easy: you simply put
kstart and some options
before a command. To begin, let's look at how we might use
kstart to customize the behaviour of a
KCalc window. The command we'll use is as follows:
%kstart--ontop--alldesktopskcalc
With luck, the effect this command has should be fairly obvious - the kcalc window will stay on top of all the others and be visible on every virtual desktop. A feature that is less obvious is that this command will work with any NET compliant environment, not just KDE.
We can pass arguments to programs we invoke with kstart as normal, for example:
%kstart--skiptaskbar--desktop1 xmessage'Hello World'
This command displays Hello
World with xmessage and
ensures that the window will be shown on the first virtual desktop and
will be omitted from the taskbar. The fact that this program is
written using the Xt toolkit rather than being a native KDE
application does not cause any problem for
kstart, hopefully this illustrates how
kstart can be used to integrate foreign
applications into your KDE desktop.
While you can use kstart to assign particular window settings, KDE also allows you to alter these -- as well as other similar settings -- from the program window itself. Simply select the leftmost button in the window titlebar (or just hit Alt+F3 once the window is focued), and then go to ->. As you can see, from here you change various things from its geometry upon startup, to whether it should have a border or not.
Now that we know how to customize the decoration of a window let's take a look at another aspect of the desktop: the system tray. The system tray is an area in which an application can display a small window. It is used to display status information or provide quick access to commands. A window that has an item in the system tray usually disappears from the task manager when minimised with the tray icon providing a replacement. Normally tray icons are specifically developed as part of an application, but as with window decorations, KDE provides a tool for changing this: ksystraycmd.
To begin with, we'll take the standard application KCalc and turn it into a system tray application. This is acheived with one simple command:
%ksystraycmd--title'kcalc' kcalc
The icon shown in the tray is the one specified in the window hints and will be updated if the icon changes. The window title is shown as a tooltip if you hold the mouse over the icon. ksystraycmd follows standard KDE behaviour so the target window can be shown and hidden by clicking the tray icon, and a standard context menu is available.
To illustrate the other features of
ksystraycmd, we'll use a more complicated example: a Konsole window tracking the
.xsession-errors file (this is the log file that records what's
happening on your desktop). To begin with, we'll simply look at how
we can view this:
%konsole--iconlog--caption'X Log' \--nomenubar--notabbar--noframe\-etail -f ~/.xsession-errors
The --caption and --icon
arguments are provided as standard by KDE applications. You can get
a full list of these global options by running an application with the
--help-kde and --help-qt
parameters. Here we give our Konsole window the title 'X Log' and
the icon “log”. You can use these options with any KDE application and
as mentioned above, ksystraycmd takes account of these when creating
the tray icon. The -e argument is specific to Konsole and tells it
to run the less command. Despite its complexity, we can easily move
this window into the tray with ksystraycmd:
%ksystraycmd--hidden--title'X Log' \ konsole --icon log --caption 'XLog' \ --nomenubar --notabbar --noframe \ -e tail -f .xsession-errors
In addition to being the
most complex command we've used, this example demonstrates the
--hidden option which starts the command with only the system tray
icon visible. This example achieves our aim of providing quick access
to the log file, but we can do things a little more efficiently if we
only run the konsole process when it is visible. The command we use
is
%ksystraycmd--startonshow\ --iconlog--tooltip'X Log' \ konsole --icon log --caption 'X Log' \ --nomenubar --notabbar --noframe \ -e tail -f ~/.xsession-errors
The addition of the --startonshow parameter tells
ksystraycmd to start with only the tray
icon visible (like the --hidden parameter), and to wait until the user
activates the tray icon before running the target command. We've also
used the --quitonhide parameter which tells ksystraycmd to terminate
the target app whenever its window is hidden. Using both these
parameters ensures that our Konsole tray icon doesn't waste resources
when we aren't using it. Creating and destroying the target window as
we do here prevents the standard icon and title handling of
ksystraycmd from working, so we now need to
specify the initial icon and tooltip explicitly
too.
In all of our previous examples we've relied on
kstart and
ksystraycmd to figure out which window we
want to affect, and unless we say otherwise, they assume that the first
window to appear is the one we want. This policy is usually OK because
we are starting the application at the same time, but it can fail
badly when lots of windows are appearing (such as when you log on). To
make our commands more robust we can use the
--window parameter. This specifies the title
of the target window. The following example uses the --window parameter
to ensure that a particular konsole window is affected:
%kstart--iconify--window'kstart_me' konsole --caption 'kstart_me' -e tail -f ~/.xsession-errors
Here we've used the tried and tested technique of specifying a
title for both kstart and the target application. This is generally
the best way to use kstart and ksystraycmd. The --window argument is
supported by both kstart and ksystraycmd and can be regular expression
(e.g. “window[0-9]”) as well as a particular title. (Regular
expressions are a powerful pattern matching tool you'll find used
throughout KDE.)
Sometimes, one screen's worth is just not enough space. If you use many applications at the same time, and find yourself drowning in different windows, virtual desktops offer the solution. By default, KDE has four virtual desktops, each one of which is like a separate screen: you can open windows, move windows around, and set backgrounds and icons on each of the desktops. If you are familiar with the concept of virtual terminals, you will have no trouble with KDE's virtual desktops.
To move to a different virtual desktop, you can use Ctrl+Tab in the same way as you would use Alt+Tab to switch between windows (see the section called “Switching Between Windows”): Hold down Ctrl and then press Tab. A small popup window appears, showing the virtual desktops, with one highlighted. If you release Ctrl, KDE will switch to the highlighted virtual desktop. To select a different desktop, press Tab repeatedly, while holding down Ctrl. The selection moves through the available desktops. When the desktop you want to switch to is highlighted, release Ctrl.
