WINDOW PREVIEWS If Your Window Manager Is Too Boring Or Spartan for Your Liking, Why Not Add a Touch of Pep? Skippy Is An

LINUXUSER DeskTOPia: Skippy

Working with the Skippy Screen Pager WINDOW PREVIEWS If your window manager is too boring or Spartan for your liking, why not add a touch of pep? Skippy is an

imaginative screen pager with an integrated preview function. BY ANDREA MÜLLER Hannes Keller, visipix.com

lmost any window manager will window manager or a quick glance at and Mandrake Linux have different fla- give you a window list, display- the Readme file supplied with the man- vors of icewm. The icewm-gnome pack- Aing a menu with the active win- ager should tell you if this is the case. age will work with Skippy, whereas dows when you click or press the right Also, the Skippy developers have a list of icewm gives you a small-footprint ver- key. If the programmer who developed window managers that Skippy supports sion of the window manager without the window manager has a soft spot for on the project homepage. Supported Gnome support. graphical gimmicks, the list might add managers include Fluxbox 0.9.9, icons to the program names. But a win- XFWM4 icewm and WindowMaker. Quick Start dow chooser will not speed up the Gnome compatibility is an option with Skippy is not included with most distrib- process of switching between windows the last two window managers in this utions, and this typically means building if you are working with a selection of list; you need to enable the the tool from the source code. You can different browsers and terminal win- --enable-gnome configure parameter download the program archive from [1]. dows. Skippy [1] by Hyriand to the res- when building the program. If you sim- After installing the libraries, imlib2 cue: instead of giving you a simple list, ply installed from your distribution CDs, (Mandrake Linux calls this package Skippy displays the active application your version of WindowMaker should be libimlib2) and freetype, along with the windows graphically in full-screen fine, however, as most major distribu- appropriate developer packages on your mode. tions enable Gnome support. Debian machine, simply enter make to compile Skippy. Then, work- Sophisticated ing as the root user, Window managers have different enter make install to approaches to handling active windows, install the program in and Skippy is choosy about the man- /usr/local/bin. agers it supports. To ensure that you will Skippy parses the be able to switch between GUI-based .skippyrc file in your programs, you need a Gnome- or Figure 1: If Skippy outputs this error message and refuses to home directory for its NetWM-compatible window manager, launch, your window manager may be using the [F11] key as a configuration. You do such as Waimea. The homepage for the shortcut. not need to create

82 ISSUE 52 MARCH 2005 WWW.LINUX- MAGAZINE.COM DeskTOPia: Skippy LINUXUSER

[F11]. To use the and select the window you need by window chooser pressing [Enter]. Alternatively, just click despite this, you on the application you need. Skippy can either modify shows you a tooltip for the current win- the hotkey in your dow. The tooltip reflects the current con- window manager tent of the title bar in that window. hotkey or in When you select a window, Skippy Skippy. The .skip- moves that window to the foreground pyrc configuration and switches back to desktop mode. If file tells you you want to quit the preview without which shortcut selecting a window, you can quit win- displays the window selection mode by pressing dow list. Check [Escape]. the [general] sec- Skippy loses track at times and shows tion for the follow- you windows that you have already ing line closed, but you can press [Ctrl-F11] Figure 2: Skippy gives you a preview of the active windows. instead of [F11] to tell Skippy to update keysym = F11 the preview. this file yourself, however, as Skippy comes with a ready-to-run template. The and replace F11 with an unused key. Of Fine Tuning file is stored as .skippyrc-default in the course, you cannot use normal alphanu- Although Skippy’s default color scheme window manager’s source code direc- merical keys; your options are restricted is quite breathtaking, it might not match tory. You can type the following com- to the function keys or special keys. your preconfigured desktop design. The mand Many Skippy users select the [Scroll .skippyrc configuration file allows you to Lock] key, as most window managers do style the preview to your own taste. The cp skippyrc-default ~/.skippyrc not map the key. To use this key assign- [normal] section defines the colors for ment, edit the line in .skippyrc as fol- inactive windows, and the [highlight] for to copy the file to the appropriate path. lows: active windows. The options for the color scheme use the same names in Windows Roll! keysym = Scroll_Lock both sections. For example, tint = is the Typing window color option, and border= After sorting out any keyboard conflicts allows you to define the frame color. skippy & and launching Skippy, you will not see a Skippy will accept color values in lot of Skippy, as the program just hides HTML notation and color names. You launches Skippy as a background task. If in the background until you press the can run the kcolorchooser to discover you see a message that says X Error of key defined in .skippyrc ([F11] by HTML values. To find out which colors failed request: BadAccess (attempt to default.) When you do so, Skippy moves the system knows, run showrgb | less. access private resource denied (Figure 1), the active windows to the foreground to The entries in Listing 1 give a preview Skippy is simply trying to tell you that it take snapshots of them, before switching that displays inactive windows in blue cannot reserve the preset shortcut key to full-screen mode and giving you a pre- and the active program in light yellow. [F11]. This happens if your current win- view of the active programs (Figure 2). Lines starting with a pound sign (#) are dow manager uses the [F11] key or a Inactive windows are semi-transpar- comments on the individual options. ■ combination of [F11] and another key as ent, and Skippy colors active windows a shortcut. For example, Fluxbox toggles mauve. You can use the arrow keys to After nearly two-years as an to desktop number 11 when you press toggle through the individual programs independent journalist, Andrea Mueller works as a new editor for the Linux New Media AG. Listing 1: Color Definitions in ~/skippyrc When she is not taking care of 01 [normal] 08 opacity = 200 articles or wrapping packages for the EasyLinux download area, she 02 #brightness 09 #Frame color looks beyond Linux and is

03 brightness = 0.0 10 border = SteelBlue THE AUTHOR involved with other operating sys- tems like QNX, BeOS and NetBSD. 04 #Window tint 11 05 tint = light sky blue 12 [highlight] 06 #Degree of transparency (0 13 brightness = 0.05 INFO through 255) - the lower the 14 tint = #FFFFB8 [1] Skippy: value, http://thegraveyard.org/skippy.php 15 opacity = 255 07 #the more transparent the [2] freedesktop.org standards: 16 border = #A4A7A2 window display http://www.freedesktop.org