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The Desktop window
Overview
A Desktop window is divided into six parts.
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| Both the icon drawers and the status bar can be hidden/shown via the View menu. This might be a useful option on small screens to gain more space for the folder views. |
The Metview filesystem
Each Metview session defines a home folder (by default it is ~/metview). This folder is set as both the home and root folder for Desktop! This has two implications. First, the home folder icon
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in Desktop always refers to the Metview home folder (and not the UNIX home folder)! Second, we cannot directly access files outside this file system from within Desktop (but we can use symbolic links for these files/folders).
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Folders are represented by this icon in the user interface:
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To enter a folder double-click, hit enter or right-click Open on the icon. Folders can also be opened in a new tab or window by using the context menu of the Folder icon.
Folder tabs
The central part of Desktop can contain multiple tabs, each showing a different folder. Folder navigation works for each tab independently.
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Folder navigation is based on the Back, Forward and Up arrows and on the breadcrumbs, which are all located in the toolbar. The breadcrumbs consist of the Home icon and the folder hierarchy to the right of it, including the arrows in-between them.
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Both breadcrumbs and history items have a context menu, which allows opening the folders in a new tab or window.
Folder view properties
View modes
There are three folder view modes available:
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The view modes can be set for each tab separately through the View menu or by using these toolbar icons:
Changing icon sizes
The status bar features an icon size slider to change the icon sizes in the current folder (sizes between 16 and 96 pixels are available).
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The icon size can also be changed from the View menu or from the Desktop context menu.
Folder settings
View mode and icon size are stored for each folder separately. When a folder is opened for the first time in Desktop these settings are read directly from existing MetviewUI settings. For newly created/opened folders the default view mode and icon size is used. The default settings can be overwritten via the Tools → Preferences menu:
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- Apply icon size to all open folders: a one-off action to set the icon size in all the open folders to that of the current folder
- Save view settings as default: saves the view mode and icon size of the current folder as the default
- Revert view settings to default: changes the view mode and icon size for the current folder back to the default settings
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As the mouse hovers over an icon in the folder views certain icon information such as name, type, size and modification date are automatically displayed at left edge of the status bar:
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Icon drawers are a set of tabs containing icon-strips appearing at the bottom of each Desktop window. Their contents are shared among the Desktop windows, so each window shows the same set of drawers.
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Metview will not update the contents of the icon drawers automatically any more. These tabs belong to the users now, which means that users are responsible for organising them. Please note that this is a different behaviour to MetviewUI, which automatically updated the icon drawers with new system icons. System icons in Desktop are exclusively available in the Create new icon dialog. |
Working with Drawers
Dragging an icon from the icon drawers to the Folder views creates a copy of that icon in the target folder. Similarly, dragging an icon from a Folder view to the Icon drawers adds a copy of this icon to the target drawer.
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Please note that icon drawers can be hidden/shown via the View menu.
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The Folder view context menu (right-click anywhere in the view when no icons are selected to see this menu) offer various ways to create new icons in Desktop:
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Icon drawers contain only user defined icons, so there can be several copies of the same type of icon with different contents. Also, icon drawers are never updated by Desktop, so they are not supposed to contain the complete set of Metview icons. On the contrary, the Create new icon dialog features the complete list of the Metview icons that users can create, and there is only one instance of an icon (the system version) available there. |
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Symbolic links to files and folders can be created from the Folder view context menu: Create new... Link to File/Folder. In this way, Metview can 'see' files which are outside its home folder.
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Both folders and tab-sets can be bookmarked. Bookmarks can be accessed either via the bookmarks menu or the bookmarks sidebar.
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- with the Bookmarks button in the toolbar
- from the View menu
- by pressing Ctrl+B.
Bookmarking a folder
There are various ways to bookmark a folder. It can be done with:
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- the context menu of the Bookmarks sidebar
- the bookmarks icon at the right hand edge of the breadcrumbs.
Bookmarking tabs
To bookmark a set of folder tabs use either:
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Tab-sets are indicated with a distinct grey icon in the bookmarks list like this (in this case "Demo" is a tab-set bookmark):
Using bookmarks
Bookmark items can be opened in various ways (e.g. in a new tab or in a new window) via their context menu. Opening a tab-set will replace the current tabs in the window.
Icon filtering
Desktop features a filtering facility for finding icons in cluttered desktops. Just press Crtl+F in any of the folder views to bring up the icon filter bar at the bottom of the folder view. By typing in a filter term for name or/and type the icons not matching the filter are greyed out in the Folder view.
Drag and drop
Users can copy icons between Folder views by dragging them with the middle mouse button.
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The drop target can also be a Folder icon, a folder tab, a breadcrumbs item, a bookmarks item or an icon drawer. The rules are the same except for icon drawers where both the left and middle mouse button drag actions mean copy!
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The desktop context menu provides a specific set of actions available for the given Folder view.
Arranging icons on a grid
For the Classic and Simple view modes the icons can be arranged on a grid sorted by the icon name, type or file size, respectively. This is a one-off action laying out the icons just once, then the icons can be freely moved again.
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The icon context menu is icon specific and only shows the actions available for the given icon. The snapshot below shows the context menu for a Grib Filter icon:
The default action
The Edit action in this example is highlighted in bold because it is the default action for this icon. The default action is triggered by double-click or hitting Enter on the icon. The default action is specific for an icon type (for certain icons it is not defined at all).
Multiple selection
Desktop provide multiple icon selection by using:
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For multiple selection the icon context menu shows a specific set of actions only:
Clipboard usage
Desktop uses the system clipboard to implement the Copy, Cut and Paste actions on the current icon selection.
Deleting icons
Unwanted icons can be moved to the wastebin by using the Move to wastebin action (Del shortcut). The wastebin can be emptied in order to permanently delete the icon(s).
Icon output
When there exist output messages for a given icon, it will have a Log action in its context menu, bringing up the log window for that icon. For combined icon output, see Tools.
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Archiving icons
Icons can be archived into a tar, tar.gz and tar.bz2 format by using the Archive as action in the icon context menu. Archiving is always based on the current selection. The resulting archive file is placed in the current folder and its name is generated from the first icon in the selection.
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It is important to understand that Metview icons can contain other icons, which can also contain other icons, and so on. When icons are archived these dependencies are resolved and all referred icons are saved into the archive preserving their relative positions in the filesystem. Thus, even by simply archiving one icon we can trigger the archiving of several files. Please bear in mind that symbolic links are also resolved by default when an archive is created! |
Extracting icons
For archived formats (e.g. tar.gz) Desktop offers the Extract action in the icon context menu.
Sending icons in email
It is possible to send icons in email from Metview by using the Send action from the icon context menu. When this action is triggered a tar.gz file is generated behind the scenes by resolving all the necessary dependencies (see Archiving icons) and all the needed icon descriptor files are also added to the resulting archive file. Having generated the tar.gz file this dialog pops up:
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The automatically generated part of the message contains clear instructions on how to import the icons in the tar.gz attachment into the local Metview environment.
Finding out the Metview version
Desktop displays some information about the Metview version being used in the Help → About Desktop menu:
Icon editors
Many of the icon types in Metview are editable. To edit an icon double-click or hit Enter on the icon, or right-click and select Edit from the context menu. This will bring up the icon editor assigned to the given icon type. The basic editor, which is used for the most of the Metview icons, looks like this in Desktop:
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- header: contains information about the icon being edited
- toolbar: contains a set of buttons to customise the editor
- parameters: each icon parameter can be individually edited here
- editor drawers: offers various drawers storing custom icons
- button box: contains the buttons to e.g. save, reset the editor.
Toolbar actions
The toolbar features two buttons to switch between GUI and text-based editor modes (the latter is indicated by the 'T' icon):
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Please try to avoid editing the icon in the text-based editor mode. It is there for development purposes and expert users only. |
Icon parameters
Each icon parameter has a default value. When a parameter is set to a non-default value a blue 'revert' button appears in front of it to indicate that it has been altered from the default. This button reverts the parameter to its default when clicked.
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By clicking on the helper icon the editor gets expanded and the helper editor becomes available for the given parameter.
Button box
The button box, which is located at the bottom of the editor, offers the following actions:
- Ok: save changes and close
- Save: save changes and stay open (it is also triggered by hitting Enter anywhere in the editor)
- Cancel: close and do not save changes
- Reset: reset editor to the last saved state
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Process monitor
Metview has a built-in task monitor, available from the Tools menu on the menu bar.
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This tool allows users to see which processes Metview is currently running. It also allows some control, such as the ability to abort processes (right-click menu on each process's entry).
Log
Selecting the Log option from the Tools menu brings up the Log window, showing the combined output from all icons in a single place.
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Importing folder list
On first start-up Desktop imports the MetviewUI folder list and opens all these folders up in the same window as a set of tabs.
Dot files
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.
Icon positions
Desktop only reads existing MetviewUI icon positions when it opens a folder for the first time. Then icon positions diverge in the two systems (due to the different way of storing icon information).
Drawers
Metview will not update the contents of the icon drawers automatically any more. These tabs belong to the users now, which means that users are responsible for organising them. Please note that this is a different behaviour to MetviewUI, which automatically updates the icon drawers with new system icons. System icons in Desktop are exclusively available in the Create new icon dialog.