What is Desktop?
Desktop is a bespoke file manager designed to access and work with Metview icons. It is meant to replace the current user interface (called MetviewUI) later this year.
What Metview version is required?
The minimum recommended metview version to run Desktop is 4.4.6.
How to start up Metview with Desktop?
You need to start Metview with the -desktop flag. At ECMWF the moment the best version to try Desktop out is metview4_dev, so the command command to use is as follows:
metview4_devnew -desktop
Outside ECMWF you need to use your local metview command.
Are there still dot files in Desktop?
MetviewUI stores icon positions and types in hidden files (dot files). There is one such file for each icon. In Desktop this information is still stored but there is only one dot file per folder.
The user interface
Desktop's user interface is divided into six parts.
- Menubar: contains menus and actions
- Toolbar: contains a set of buttons/widgets to customise the view and navigate through the folders
- Folder view: contents of the currently selected folder (or folders in different tabs).
- Sidebar: contains either the Bookmarks panel or the Create New Icon panel
- Drawers: drawers are a set of centrally accessible folder tabs. They appear at the bottom of each Desktop window.
- Statusbar: displays information about the icons and provides the buttons for changing the icon size
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