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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 Metview UI) in the near future.

How to start up Desktop?

You need to start Metview with the -desktop flag. At the moment the best version to try Desktop out is metview_dev, so the command is as follows:

metview_dev -desktop

The user interface

Desktop's user interface is divided into six parts.

  • Menubar:
  • Toolbar: it contains a set of buttons/widgets to customise the view and navigate through the folders
  • Folder view: this is the central part of the Desktop showing the contents of the currently selected folder. This area can contain multiple tabs each containing a different folder.
  • Sidebar: it contains either the Bookmarks panel or the Create New Icon panel
  • Drawers: drawers are a set of centrally accessible folders organised into tabs. The appear at the bottom of each Desktop window.
  • Statusbar: it displays information about the icons and provides the buttons for changing the icon size

Folder navigation

Folders are represented by this icon in the user interface:

To enter a folder double-click or right-click Open on the icon. Folder navigation is based on the Back, Forward and Up arrows and on the breadcrumbs, which are all located in the toolbar. 

Each visited folder is added to the folder history that can be accessed via the History menu (it can store at most 20 folders).

Metview root folder

Each Metview session defines a root 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 icon in Desktop always means the Metview root folder (and not the UNIX home folder)! Second, we cannot directly access files outside this file system from within Desktop but we need to use symbolic links.

Folder Views

There are two folder view modes available: icon view mode and detailed view mode. They can be set to each tab separately through the View menu or using these toolbar icons:

 

 

 

 

Tabs

 

Enter folder

Bookmarks

 

 

Drawers

 

 

Create new icons

 

Send email

 

Compress icons

Icon editors

History

Preferences

Log

Monitor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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