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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) later this year.

How to start up Metview with 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: 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 folders organised into 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

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. 

Folders can be also be opened in a new tab or window by using the context menu of the Folder icon. Breadcrumbs items (and even bookmarks) also offer this possibility via their context menus.

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 view

This is the central part of Desktop showing the contents of the currently selected folder. This area can contain multiple tabs each showing a different folder. Folder navigation works for each tab independently.

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:

 

Bookmarks

Both folders and a set of folder tabs can be bookmarked. Bookmarks can be accessed either via the Bookmarks menu or the Bookmarks sidebar. We can open the the Bookmarks sidebar via the View menu or by the Ctrl+B shortcut.

There are many different ways to bookmark a folder. You can use 

  • Bookmarks menu
  • the context menu of a Folder icon, Folder tab or Breadcrumbs item.
  • the context menu of the Bookmarks sidebar
  • the bookmarks icon at the right hand edge of the Breadcrumbs.

To bookmark a set of folder tabs you can use:

  • the Bookmarks menu 
  • the context menu in the Bookmarks sidebar

Bookmark items can be open in various ways (e.g. in a new tab or in a new window) via their context menu.

Drawers

Drawers are a set of centrally accessible and user customisable folders appearing at the bottom of each Desktop window. This contents of this area is shared between the Desktop windows (per Metview user).

 

Create new icons

There are two ways to create new icon in Desktop.

 

Send email

 

Compress icons

Icon editors

History

Preferences

Log

Monitor

 

 

 

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