Metview's documentation is now on readthedocs!

Please go to https://metview.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

You are viewing an old version of this page. View the current version.

Compare with Current View Page History

« Previous Version 9 Next »

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 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

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. You can open the the Bookmarks sidebar via the View menu or with the Ctrl+B shortcut.

There are various ways to bookmark a folder. You can use 

  • the 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 opened in various ways (e.g. in a new tab or in a new window) via their context menu.

Icon drawers

Icon drawers are a set of tabs containing icon-strips appearing at the bottom of each Desktop window. Their contents  is shared between the Desktop windows (per Metview user). Users are free to customise both the drawer tabs and the icons they store. By dragging an icon from the Icon drawers to the Folder views creates a copy of that icon in the target folder. Similarly by dragging an icon from a Folder view to the Icon drawers adds a copy of this icon to target drawer.

Drawers conteny

 

Please note that Icon drawers can be hidden/shown via the View menu.

Create new icons

On top of using the Icon drawers there are other ways to create new icons in Desktop. The first option is to use the New icon sidebar. You you can open it the via the View menu or with the Ctrl+N shortcut.  Its interface shows you all the icons that can be created in Metview. To create a new icon just drag it to one of the Folder views.

The second option to create new icons is to use the Folder view context menu (right-click anywhere in the view when no icons are selected to see this menu):

Here action 'Create New Icon' will start up a modeless Create icon dialog, which contains the same interface as the Create icon sidebar. There are other two actions to use: 'Create new Folder' and 'Create new Macro' directly creates a new Folder or a Macro, respectively.

Send email

 

Compress icons

Icon editors

History

Preferences

Log

Monitor

 

 

 

  • No labels