E17 User Guide/Menus and submenus

The first thing that you need to know is where are all the menus and what is their purpose. That's for sure. So, let's begin.

The Main Menu

This is E17's Main Menu. There are two ways to make it to show up, the one is by just clicking on your desktop with the left mouse button, the second is when you click on the Start module (we will talk about it a bit later in this guide). It contains some submenus, let's take a look at them.

Applications

This menu shows your XDG menus, i.e. the same menu that GNOME/KDE uses. If it's blank and there are no categories nor applications in it, just paste a .menu file in your ~/.config/menus directory. For example:

cp /etc/xdg/menus/gnome-applications.menu ~/.config/menus/applications.menu

And you can edit it in the way you want. If you don't want to edit the .menu file, but you want your menu to be updated every time you install an application, try to set your XDG_MENU_PREFIX variable like this:

export XDG_MENU_PREFIX="gnome-" 

for GNOME and

export XDG_MENU_PREFIX="kde-"

for KDE.

Note: If you are using a C-like shell use "setenv" instead of "export".

That's it. You can start your favorite applications now. :-)

Files

This will open up the built-in file manager. You can browse your files, but don't expect something like Konqueror or Nautilus - it's not ready yet. At first you will see the places that you most probably expect to see - your home directory, your root directory, your Desktop directory, Tmp and of course - your devices. Enough for now. We will talk about file browsing with more details later.

Run Command

There is an application without a launcher and you want to fire it up? No problem. Main Menu -> Run Command is your friend. The keybiding, Alt+Esc too.

Desktop

This submenu's main purpose is to help you navigate through the virtual desktops. Hold your mouse on the Virtual submenu and choose on which virtual desktop you want to go.

It does several other things as well. You can hit the Show/Hide All Windows button to hide or show all windows on the current desktop. From here you can also add/edit/delete the things called Shelves, but we will cover them in the next section.

Windows

Yes, you guessed right. From this submenu you can select a window. Note that it shows all windows from all virtual desktops.

If you have opened a lot of windows on one desktop and it looks like a mess, you can click on the "Clenup Windows" button - E17 will make your desktop neater. Also, some windows are getting "lost" sometimes. For example when you change your screen resolution. If you can't find your window and you're sure that it's still there, check out the "Lost Windows" submenu.

Enlightenment

If you want to know who to thank for this beautiful desktop shell - see "About". "Theme" is to see the name and the author of the current theme.

Restart Enlightenment will restart E17 but it will not stop X.

Exit Enlightenment differs a bit, and it will stop your X and E. :-)

Configuration

From here you will be able to configure Enlightenment. Just after you read the rest of the guide.

System

From this submenu you can logout or lock your screen with password. You can also shutdown, reboot, suspend, halt your system.