Overview of Desktop Breathing Space

Documentation / Contents - Dock Area

• Overview of Desktop Breathing Space
  • What the Zone Is For
  • The Controls
• Choosing an Edge
• Setting the Size
  • The Fifty Percent Limit
• Reading the Preview
  • The Hazard Stripes
  • The Five Windows
• Applying the Change
• When the Toolchest Owns the Zone
• From the Command Line
• Where the Settings Live
• Copyright Information

Desktop Breathing Space

This small tool reserves a strip along one edge of your screen that tiled and maximized windows will not use. Blueprint's name for that strip is the Desktop Exclusion Zone, and the program that aims it is called cydock. The window is titled "Desktop Breathing Space"; minimized, it is labelled "Dock Area".

What the Zone Is For

Tiling is excellent right up to the moment it covers the whole screen. Once it does, your minimized icons are buried, the File Manager's desktop icons are buried, and there is nowhere to drop anything.

The zone is the answer: a band the window manager treats as off limits when it tiles or maximizes. Windows stop at its edge. What is behind it stays reachable.

Off is a perfectly good setting. If you never tile and never maximize, you do not need a zone.

Who Owns It

The window manager owns the zone. This tool only aims it: it writes two settings and asks the window manager to re-read them. Everything else, including republishing the usable screen area to programs that watch it and re-tiling what is on screen, is the window manager's work.

The Controls

Reserve along which edge:     None, Top, Bottom, Left, Right
How much:                     a wheel and a percentage
Five windows, Fair tiling:    the preview
Apply                         write it and take effect
Close                         dismiss the window

In This Book

• Choosing an Edge
• Setting the Size
• Reading the Preview
• Applying the Change
• When the Toolchest Owns the Zone
• From the Command Line
• Where the Settings Live

The window manager's own book, WindowManager, covers tiling itself: what the modes are and what maximize does. Open Help Books in the Contents pane and pick WindowManager.