Where the Settings Live

Documentation / Contents - Desks

• Overview of the Desks Overview
  • What Belongs to the Window Manager
• Switching Desks
  • Finding the Current Desk
  • The Scroll Arrows
• Moving Windows Between Desks
  • The Global Desk
  • Click, Double-Click and Drag
• Creating, Renaming, and Removing Desks
  • Naming a Desk
  • Adding a Desk
  • Removing a Desk
• The Menus
  • The Overview Menu
  • The Desk Menu
  • The Window Menu
  • The Help Menu
  • The Button 3 Popup
• Size, Orientation, and Labels
  • Scale
  • Orientation
  • Window Labels
  • Snapshots or Buttons
• Setting Preferences
  • The Overview Page
  • The Desk Names Page
  • Apply and Close
• Keys and Shortcuts
  • Overview Menu
  • Desk Menu
  • Window Menu
• Where the Settings Live
• Copyright Information

Where the Settings Live

The overview's own presentation settings are written to one plain text file, one setting per line, with "#" starting a comment.

~/.cyanotype/cydesks.conf     how the map is drawn
CYDESKS_CONF                  use this file instead (env)
share/cydesks/cydesks.conf    the shipped defaults

The desk count and the desk names are NOT in this file. They belong to the window manager, which keeps them itself; the count is written to the window manager's own settings. See Overview of the Desks Overview.

The Settings

scale           0.04 to 0.18; map size (default 0.08)
visible_desks   cells to draw; 0 means all (default 3)
orientation     auto, horizontal or vertical
snapshots       1 for miniature windows, 0 for plain buttons
global_desk     1 to show the Global cell
name_display    window, icon or none (default icon)
menubar         1 to show the menu bar
label_color     scheme, or a colour name
default_width   0 to size from the scale; else pixels

default_width

Everything except this one has a control in the panel or on a menu. default_width is here because there is a case it answers and nothing else does: when you run enough windows that their labels collide in the map, widening the window gives the cells room, since the cells divide whatever width the window has. Height always follows the scale.

Zero, the default, changes nothing: the window is exactly as wide as the scale says.

Making a Hand Edit Take Effect

The running overview re-reads its settings on request, which is what the preferences panel's Apply does. To do it yourself:

cydesks-prefs --apply

That writes and pokes without opening a window. See Setting Preferences for the rest of the command line.