Sprucing Up Your Xubuntu Desktop Icons
I honestly try not to get too locked into the aesthetics of my system. As long as everything works, I tell myself looks shouldn’t matter.
But looks do matter.
And once I read about the ugly borders around Xubuntu desktop icons, that’s all I could see.
Luckily, getting rid of the ugly border is a trivial thing. There’s a great guide here. It took me about three minutes to do. The only issue is you need to logout and then back to in for the changes to take effect.
I knew I just wanted to get rid of the ugly background. But once I did that, I also knew I wanted white text. And once I did that, I knew I wanted the text to stay white when a file was selected.
You can see the results here:
Here’s my simple .gtkrc-2.0 file:
style “xfdesktop-icon-view” {
XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 0fg[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”
}
fg[SELECTED] = “#ffffff”
widget_class “*XfdesktopIconView*” style “xfdesktop-icon-view”
Don’t ask me what any of that means. I believe the label-alpha controls the border around the text and I know the color white in HTML. Everything else is kind of an uneducated guess.
I understand that some people say Linux desktops are ugly and I’m glad Canonical seems to be working so hard to make them beautiful, but I really appreciate using an OS that gives me such fine control over every aspect of my experience. Not only do I not have to live with ugly borders, I can make the desktop icons look pretty much however I want them to.
It doesn’t make me more productive, but it does make me happy. And happiness counts in computing.
Plus, I’m very, very slowly building a computing environment that looks beautiful to me (and perhaps only to me). That’s a pretty amazing opportunity.
Xubuntu and the Mystery of the Application Launcher
I loved GNOME-Do back when I ran Ubuntu (and Arch and Fedora). When I moved to Xubuntu, I wanted something that ran a little smoother, though. I found GNOME-Do a bit sluggish. Plus, it would often launch itself immediately after I opened a browser.
I tried a bunch of launchers (a good place to start is here) before I realized I could use the native Xfce application launcher.
To be more precise, it’s the Xfce application finder.
I created a keyboard shortcut for xfce4-appfinder, binding it to my old GNOME-Do command.
Now, an application menu comes up that allows me to type the name of the application I wish to launch.
To be fair, it’s nowhere near as robust or customizable as GNOME-Do. But it suits my purposes just fine and feel pretty stable within Xubuntu (so far).
I’m finding Xubuntu can do a lot of nice things both well and natively. It’s simply a matter of translating the function from GNOME to Xfce.
