Config Files
~/.icewm/keys, ~/.icewm/menu, and ~/.icewm/preferences, and ~/.icewm/toolbar, and ~/.icewm/winoptions. The default versions are
installed in /usr/share/icewm/ and
will be used if you have not copied them to ~/.icewm.
Configuration Information
If IceWM is the only Window
Manager you want to use, you can start it with an .xinitrc file in your home folder. Be sure to
backup your current .xinitrc before
proceeding.
echo icewm-session > ~/.xinitrc
Now create the IceWM
configuration files:
mkdir -v ~/.icewm &&
cp -v /usr/share/icewm/keys ~/.icewm/keys &&
cp -v /usr/share/icewm/menu ~/.icewm/menu &&
cp -v /usr/share/icewm/preferences ~/.icewm/preferences &&
cp -v /usr/share/icewm/toolbar ~/.icewm/toolbar &&
cp -v /usr/share/icewm/winoptions ~/.icewm/winoptions
You can now edit these files to meet your requirements. In
particular, review the preferences
file. You can use Logout ->
Restart-IceWM on the main menu to load your
changed preferences, but changes to the background only take
effect when IceWM is started.
At this point you can either modify the traditional menu
files to suit your requirements, or use the newer icewm-menu-fdo described later.
The syntax of the menus is explained in the help files, which you
can access by running help from the menu, but some of
the detail is out of date and the default selections in the menus
(a few old applications on the main menu, everything else on the
Programs menu) will
benefit from being updated to meet your needs. The following
examples are provided to encourage you to think about how you
wish to organise your menus. Please note the following:
-
If a program listed in the menu has not been installed, it
will not appear when the menu is displayed. Similarly, if
the program exists but the specified icon does not, no icon
will be displayed in the menu.
-
The icons can be either .xpm
or .png files, and there is
no need to specify the extension. If the icon is located in
the "library" (/usr/share/icewm/icons) there is no need
to specifiy the path.
-
Most programs are in sub-menus, and the main menu will
always append entries for windows,
help, settings, logout at the bottom.
-
An icon for firefox was
copied to the library directory and given a meaningful
name. The icon for xine is
xine.xpm which was installed
to a pixmap directory.
-
The default toolbar is not altered.
If you wish to use this traditional method, there are more
examples in previous releases of this book (e.g. BLFS-7.8).
Alternatively, you can
create a menu which conforms to the FDO Desktop Menu
Specifications, where programs can be found because they have a
.desktop file in the XDG_DATA_HOME or XDG_DATA_DIR directories.
Unlike most windowmanagers, icewm does not search for programs when the
menu is invoked, so if you take this route you will need to rerun
the following command after installing or removing programs:
icewm-menu-fdo >~/.icewm/menu
If you wish to put icons on your desktop, you will need to
install a program such as Rox-Filer-2.11 which provides a pinboard. If
you do that you will no longer be able to access the menu by
right-clicking on the desktop, you will have to use the
IceWM button. To ensure that the
rox pinboard is running, the
following commands will put it in the startup file:
cat > ~/.icewm/startup << "EOF"
rox -p Default &
EOF &&
chmod +x ~/.icewm/startup
![[Tip]](../images/tip.png)
Tip
There are a number of keyboard shortcuts in IceWM:
-
Ctrl + Alt + FN
: go to ttyN.
-
Ctrl + Alt + N
: go to desktop number N
-
Ctrl + Alt + Space : open a box on the taskbar where you
can key in the name of an application and run it.