Xfce Paper Cuts
My switch to Xfce has “some pebbles in the shoes.” Paper cut issues.
There are two irritating bugs with xfce4-terminal. One is the window size continually shrinks when using the tab bar and midnight commander (mc).
- Launch xfce4-terminal.
- Launch mc.
- Edit a file with the default mcedit.
- Exit mcedit but not mc.
The xfce4-terminal window shrinks.
The second irritant with xfce4-terminal and mc is strange fonts.
- Launch xfce4-terminal.
- Open mc.
- Select a text file.
- Press F4 to launch mcedit.
- Exit mcedit.
The fonts in the tab and window title bar change to some kind of hieroglyphics fonts.
As a quick test I installed roxterm and saw the same hieroglyphics fonts. Perhaps that points to the underlying vte engine that both terminal emulators use.
Return to using mate-terminal even when using Xfce? That is no panacea either. There is no way to disable tooltips in the mate-terminal tabs. No way to configure a persistent toolbar. No way to disable tab scrolling with the mouse wheel. I’ll have to tinker with other terminal emulators to find cures.
Another font related issue is with starting the Xfce desktop. I had Thunderbird in my autostart directory. Since forever with Slackware I have booted into runlevel 3. When I launch Xfce through startx, Thunderbird starts but the fonts are all quite tiny. Closing and relaunching Thunderbird resolves the issue. I never had this problem with MATE. My solution in my thunderbird.desktop is Exec=bash -c "sleep 5; thunderbird".
The Xfce panel menu does not support keyboard accelerators. For example, with the MATE menu, I press Alt+F1 to open the menu, then press O and L to launch LibreOffice. In Xfce the keyboard accelerators do not function likewise, instead requiring the keyboard arrow navigator keys. The Alt+F2 launcher works, but this is not my normal method for launching apps.
I don’t want to return fully to MATE because of the original unresolved screen freezing.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: Xfce
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