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Tip of the week: Display your desklets in one mouse move

Author ppmt, Thursday 17 April 2008 à 06:44
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Note: this article is a translation. You can find its original version written by Necropotame here

This article is I hope the first of a long series, at least that's the plan! Indeed instead of keeping our little tricks for ourself we should share them. So if you know tricks or have tips on Cairo-Dock or one of its plug in, do not hesitate to contact me either by email or private message.

Right let's start ! If like me you don't have a 4096x1024 screen resolution and most of your applications are always maximized to your screen space, you are probably having issues to access your desklets.

There is a plug-in called "ShowDesklet" that will help you for that. One click on its icon will display all the desklets on top of all your applications, another click make them go back to the background. However as far as I am concerned it is still to long to access the volume manager provided by AlasMixer or to check my CPU gauge

Another solution is use the Widgetlayer provided by Compiz which allow you to display your desklet in a special layer by moving your mouse to a corner of your screen. The only problem is that while the widget layer is not active you can't see any desklets, which is a shame as I like to see my desklets on my Desktop when all my applications are minimized.

To fix all these problems, Cairo-Dock armed itself with a DBus service. In case you wonder Dbus allows several applications to interact between each other. For example it is possible to pause Rhythmbox, to know the charge of your battery or to list all you Tomboy's notes.

In our case Cairo-Dock offer you the possibility to display an info box, to restart the dock and ... yes to display your desklets on top of your applications.
You can achieve this marvel with the following command line:

dbus-send --session --dest=org.cairodock.CairoDock /org/cairodock/CairoDock org.cairodock.CairoDock.ShowDesklet boolean:false


And in half human language:
dbus-send allow you to call a DBus method, --dest=org.cairodock.CairoDock define the DBus service requested, org/cairodock/CairoDock is the path of the methoe used and org.cairodock.CairoDock.ShowDesklet is the actual name of the method we are calling.

Now to be able to use that method when we move our mouse towards a corner of the screen, you just have to enter that line in the "Commands" tab of the general configuration part of the Compiz Manager (CCSM). You then associate the action to a corner of your screen to "Execute the command" in the "Action" tab.

http://pix.nofrag.com/5/2/7/f048c8ae6d786e956936dfd9b03dft.jpg http://pix.nofrag.com/7/e/a/5a086ee02284aab73c9964774b696t.jpg


Voila!! A simple move to the corner of your screen will now display all your desklets in the foreground!

Using the same method you can associate that command to a keyboard shortcut or a button of your mouse or even create a new launcher in your Gnome Panel!!

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