I've been enjoying my vacation time, spending a good bit of it hacking on EvilDesk. This is something of an eyecandy release, with some visually appealing refinements. I'm always wary of eyecandy for eyecandy's sake, so I've tried really hard to balance resource consumption with visual goodness. To that end, the eyecandy features can all be turned off, and can also be tuned to reduce (or increase, if you like) their memory consumption. So, what features are new?
- Added the ability to customize the appearance of slits and the task switcher. Each slit can have a custom background tile, as can the task switcher. You can also change the font, style and colour.
- Added a window thumbnail cache. This is used by the alt-tab task switcher and also by Overview.
- alt-tab uses the thumbnail cache to show previews of the applications as you're alt-tabbing.
- The new Overview plugin is inspired by OSX exposé; pressing Win-F9 (configurable) will show a zoomed-out overview of all the open windows on each monitor attached to the system. You can then click on a window thumbnail to switch to that window. Unlike exposé, Overview performs no animation.
I also made it possible to set all the settings from the .evdm, which should make things significantly easier to configure.
Check out the full change log for more details.
You can Download EvilDesk here.
Happy New Year!
Some questions on Evildesk:
- Is there a way to disable thumbnails for overview (make the overview show only rectangles with symbols, no preview)?
- Also, can Overview be started by a clickable link instead of a hotkey?
- How are entries in the right click menu and the quicklaunch plugin sorted? My list goes A Z V S B 7 ...
- Would it be possible to make the right click menu work in such a way, that a left or right click outside of the menu cancels it?
Thanks!
Ok, I found evildesk a while ago, but then stopped using it when I found that it didn't pass middle-clicks through the system tray. Glad to see that's now been fixed.
- I had a huge quicklaunch. Evildesk doesn't handle this intelligently, they just flow off the top of the screen, making the top ones unusable
- I see a bug on the bottom of the slit. About 4U (my new designation for "icon height units) from the bottom my system tray stops, but below that is a repeat of the last 2x2 grid of icons painted over the date. And the date repeats as well on top of itself a few times until it reaches the bottom of the screen. I wasted all this time typing this before I realized I could inline images. How cool of a blog feature. :)
- There might be some other tray icon bugs, I'm not positive yet, will report back.
Anyway, I'll keep it up, read the docs, see what all it can do now.
P.S. I don't think you suck for taking the holidays off of PHP work. Ungrateful leeches!
This thing rocks, finally a desktop that cuts out the crap!
Little rough around the edges, it can be crashed by trying to click away from the right click context menu a few times.. happend to me at first, it's touchy.
Where's the forum? I'm sure this will have or does have a following.
Don't know if it's me or evil destktop, but, for me, it's really great job that just don't work because of an annoying bug : .lnk, shorcut in windows, are not reconized !!! So, quick launch don't work, start menu don't work, .... So, a bit useless if I can't use shorcuts
But, I really try/use many OS and desktop, and this one is really nice...
Is there any way to disable the transparency effects in the slit and switcher? I have kind of a weak videocard (impressive when I bought it, not so much now...) that really hates transparencies over certain windows (*cough*game windows*cough*).
Is there any setting I can change to disable tranparency effects?
I have been running a linux only system for quite some time now. I now have been using WinXP at work again and felt rather uncomfortable. Remembering how much this helped me feel "at home", I came to download it and all the download links are broken... ? where can i get this again? is it still available?
Sorry, some bits got mangled when the site was moved between servers; the downloads should work again now.
http://netevil.org/ in
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