Desktop is the new desktop user interface of Metview written entirely in Qt. It is meant to replace the current user interface (called MetviewUI) later this year.

metview4_new -desktop

Notes for MetviewUI users

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 Desktop window

Overview

A Desktop window 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 the Bookmarks 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

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

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 need to use symbolic links for these files/folders).

Working with folders 

Folders are represented by this icon in the user interface:

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.

New tabs can be added by the blue button at the right edge of the tab bar or by using the Ctrl+T keyboard shourtcut.

Folder navigation

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, which can be accessed via the History menu (it can store at most 25 folders).

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:

• Classic icon view: icons are freely movable and icon labels are rendered below the icon pixmaps
• Simple icon view: icons are freely movable and icon labels are rendered to the right of the icon pixmaps
• Detailed view mode: icons and their properties are displayed in a table format

The view modes can be set to each tab separately through the View menu or using these toolbar icons:

Changing icon sizes

Th statusbar features an icon size slider to change the icon sizes in the current folder (sizes between 16 and 96 pixels are available.

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, which can be set in the Preferences (available in the Tools menu).

Desktop offers a small set of actions to customise the folder settings.These actions available from the Folder settings tool button (with the "spanner" icon) at the right edge of the statusbar and in the View menu.

These actions are as follows:

• Apply icon size to all open folders:it is a one-off action broadcasting the icon size from the current folder to all the open folders is one go
• Save view settings as default: save the view mode and icon size of the current folder as a default
• Revert view settings to default: changes the view mode and icon size for the current folder back to the default settings

Bookmarks

Both folders and a tab-sets can be bookmarked. Bookmarks can be accessed either via the Bookmarks menu or the Bookmarks sidebar. You can open the the Bookmarks sidebar with the Bookmarks button in the toolbar, in the View menu or by pressing Ctrl+B.

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 the target drawer.

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 two other actions to use: 'Create new folder' and 'Create new macro' directly creates a new Folder or a Macro, respectively.

Copy and move by drag and drop

You can copy icons between  Folder views by dragging them with the middle mouse button. Dragging an icon with the left mouse button means move.

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 the drawers where both the left and middle mouse button drag actions mean copy!

Copy, move and cut using the clipboard

Icons can be copied or moved between folders by using the Copy, Cut and Paste from clipboard actions in the context.

Icon editors

text

Tools

Sending mails

Process monitor

te