Wish list

Here you can post your feature requests. There is no guarantee that any of them will actually be implemented. Please keep the Xfce philosophy in mind and add a small explanation why this feature would be useful or a description of the problem it solves.

There is a separate page for panel plugin wishes. This page also includes the internal panel plugins.

Wishes that are struck through are implemented or rejected by the developer.

This list is meant to act as a working list for future additions, not to reopen discussion on features and things that are history.

• Xfce-icon-theme should respect freedesktops icon naming specification(http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/latest/), e.g. gnome-dev-removable-usb.svg should renamed to drive-removable-media-usb.svg, same thing for actions why there 5 symlinks to one icon? this sucks for icon-themers, why have we icons that begins with gnome? its xfce not gnome, we dont need gnome-mime-application….

• It seems that the icon management respects the XDG Base Directory Specification, while the theme management does not. see:
  • http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/

• Full keyboard control (ability to work without mouse) - e.g. being able to open desktop menu, navigate through it, focus applications in system tray, bring up the logout/shutdown dialog, show/hide/navigate Xfce panel etc. Just try to pull out your mouse (simulating USB breakdown) and watch how helpless user gets in Xfce. Xfce is great, but depending only on mouse (or keyboard only) is not good.
• Maybe add support for moving the cursor with the numpad keys.
  This is already handled by X.org, try ctrl-shift-numlock : you can move the cursor with the numpad, and click with 5.

• About the Keyboard Control in xfmenu: It'd be great to jump to a menu on key press (key press “o” jumps to Office, “n” to Network and so on) - this would make it more fast to navigate with keyboard only (and no arrow keys). I guess many people know this from Windows Taskbar navigation.

• UNIX philosophy. Make simple applications that do one thing well, and don't get in the way of the user – in the GUI. Do NOT take the kitchen sink approach. In this spirit, make an image viewer that is intuitive: PgUp/PgDn scroll up and down in the current directory, can print graphics nicely, and integrates with Thunar so that you can print a series of images with right-click, with advanced options. Similar to Microsoft's Picture and Fax Viewer – a very good application.
  • This is literally addressed by ristretto, talking about an image viewer. This wish is kind of out-of-scope, though, since Xfce does not (and I hope will not) feature its own applications for everything you could possibly need.

• Mouse+keyboard shorcuts. Actually, user can move, raise, lower, etc. windows using some hard coded combination of mouse buttons and keyboard keys, e.g. Alt+button 1 to move window. Related to the “don't get in the way of the user” philosophy commented in the previous point, I think it is better that user can define these shortcuts. I think it is not good to impose to the user certain keyboard+mouse button combinations, mainly when some user can have some accessibility issues (e.g. physical or visual disabilities). This is possible already… Settings Manager > Window Manager Settings > Keyboard > Add a new theme and adjust what you like
  • reducing the settings to keyboard only is a no-go too. You may spare out the mouse in the default settings but the mouse should be usable as well. This said, the shortcut settings should be global and not under keyboard.

• Remove hard coded Rodent icons. Best thing to do here is to follow the Freedesktop icon naming specification.
  • Not sure what you mean. Please be more specific and point out the icons that should be changed. File a bug on bugzilla if you want it to actually be seen and tracked. –kelnos

• Keep usability in mind, maybe by some usability testing. Information about usability: Apple, Gnome.
  • Please be more specific. What parts of Xfce's GUIs could be improved usability-wise? –kelnos
    • In fact Xfce's core, meanings configuration, plugins and Thunar provide a very good user experience.

• Meta-theme handling: A method by which people can distribute “meta-themes” that will set the following module themes: Xfwm theme, background settings, user interface settings (font, GTK theme, icon theme) , splash screen. Maybe also panel layout.
  • I'm not sure if it's reasonable to share the various kinds of user preferences. This could quickly make packages hard to create, modify or even use.

• Group multiple packages to reduce the number of distributed tarballs.
  Please don't! Downloading a huge archive only for one tiny program would be the same nonsense KDE practices – Kane
  • Group goodies
  • Group libraries (xfce4-libs)
    • Meta packages are fine, even separate fat tarballs, but only optional.

• More consistent and simple naming scheme for Xfce applications. Mostly for new applications or libraries, so we never make mistakes like libxfcegui4 (but libxfce4gui instead).

• Make use of Xinerama more convenient: keyboard shortcuts and window buttons/menus to transfer windows to different screens. Also add the ability to maximize across both screens and allow fullscreen across both screens.

• Improve support for foreign languages
  • Switch keyboard layouts – The xfce4-xkb-plugin can do this.
    • Adding keyboard shortcut for switching layout
      • Can be set in xorg.conf ;) - No, it can`t! Not with new short conf file!
  • Add switching of locales from a GUI.
  • Improve SCIM support, or make some documentation available for this.
    • I agree on the documentation. I wrote a few words explaining what works for me scim. Any expansion would be helpful of course.

• An optional Daemon that uses “sambatree” and mount a folder in the (desktop)/(thunar side pane) with every computer that have shared folders within, so you can just plug your XFCE box in a LAN and access shared content from every windows and linux computers without have to mount it by hand, as you do in windows computers for example. Or at least some program like the smb4k for KDE that alows you to mount with a single click what you want. EDIT: found out some way to do it, but i still prefer that someone include it in thunar: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=304131&highlight=xubuntu
  • Why invent the wheel a second or third time? There are a lot of solutions for this and i don't think xfce should provide its own method. I.e. fusesmb, as mentioned in the link, does the job quite well
    • FUSE currently isn't very GUI-friendly. There's work on an interface library (I believe it's called libfusi or something similar) that will hopefully make a GUI interface to this sort of thing much easier to create. –kelnos
      • I also like the idea of the network neighborhood type of applet, but I'd also like it to be included in the regular file manager of choice. A couple things that could be done: Someone might want to gather together the links and/or procedures they know of which can provide this functionality and place them in a wiki page. Also, it would be good to decide if Xfce is going to be just the desktop “container” for other apps or not. Right now Xfce provides Thunar (and Ristretto, among others), but there are many people like myself who wouldn't use Thunar in place of other good file managers such as XFE. In fact, I like the idea of Xfce not providing apps. Thanks. - KitchM

• Desktop-search integration with MetaTracker. Xfce applications should take advantage of it, especially Thunar for quick file tagging and advanced searching.

• Reorganization of webpresentation to offer a consistent look and feel. I got lost an all these different wikis, project-pages and blogs several times.
  • Specifics? –kelnos

• Port XFCE to cairo. Not just for transparency but for speed! http://blog.xfce.org/?p=177
  • I don't think you understand what you're talking about. Xfce already implicitly uses cairo when gtk 2.8 or higher is installed. Cairo can be used directly in a few other places – such as the panel – to create special effects, but should not be used all over the place. Note that cairo is NOT a silver-bullet for performance issues. Cairo's performance varies greatly depending on X.org version, video hardware, video drivers, etc. –kelnos

• Add a roadmap to the main-page so that users know what might be released soon, or what you are working on.
  • there is: roadmap – ElAngelo
    • Actually, I believe that they meant the main page of the whole web site. And not just for one version, but in general and overall to Xfce. - KitchM

• Integrate PM of monitor, that make xscreensaver unneeden.

• Integrate n xnumlock.
  • Good idea. Why should the user have to add it manually - KitchM

• Alternative interface of wallpaper manager
  • Questionable in my opinion. We want one good place to change user settings, not ten of them.
    • Yes, one place for everything. So much more intuitive - KitchM

• Please don't add XFCE unuseful software's like KDE and GNOME. I love XFCE. Also Please don't mix application role like KDE's Konqueror. I think the best thing is File Manager is only file manager don't have to be web browser.
  • very useless comments… bye and thnx – ElAngelo

• I don't know if this is the exact place to ask for this, but what I would like to see is more “Preferred Applications”. Right now we have just WebBrowser, MailReader and Terminal Emulator. A configuration to also choose, eg: “MusicPlayer” or “FileArchiver” would be interesting and would also provide more uniformity to users who share their XFCE configuration among multiple computers or installations. — by Luis Machuca
  • I agree wholeheartedly. - KitchM

• Provide 4.6 user guide and all application manuals.

• I wish, a more consistent integration of encrypted hard installed volumes. For example, I can see my two encrypted drives in wallpaper picking dialog?! And I cannot see it in Thunar. That must mean that Thunar has a restrictive routine about adding hard installed volumes to the side pane, which is no good, I think. The sole useful place for mount-/unmounting encrypted volumes is the file manager. No matter if it is removable or not.

• There are a few design flaws with the XFCE panel, in my opinion, which had existed for long enough already to deserve mentioning:
  • The “Freely movable” mode of it is incompatible with the behavior of the “Task list” applet: if the panel is used as a floating one, the CDE-style, the task list makes it re-size bigger when the new windows appear. The immediate problem with it is caused by the lack of “Maximal width” in pixels parameter in the “Task List” dialog.
  • Next related inconvenience is that the panel is “Always on top” or at least there is no generic enough way to allow windows to cover it, which prohibits any creative multiple-panel setup - because the more panels, the more workspace is obscured at all times. The oddly working “Auto-hide” adds up ( xfce 4.6.1, Slackware 13 )
  • The use of vertically oriented panels is very limited due to the fact that neither panel nor most of applets really assume the “vertical” sort of appearance. And, given that most of LCD monitors come in 16:9 form factor, “side-wise” alignments become handy.
  • Wishful thinking: The xfce desktop supports only “Create a launcher” kind of element on the desktop. If the “panels” are allowed to be, 1stly, covered by windows, 2ndly, have transparent decorations and 3rd, more correct and explicit size limitations, that would probably make an easy way to mimic the “KDE Plasma” and Windoze 7 sort of behavior? Please consider those options. Thanks :)

• Please add the possibility of capturing the top menu bar like OSX does: it's an efficient behavior and use it better the on-screen space, sometimes a limited resource.
• The configuration of starter icons is somewhat misleading:
  • The dialog offers some standard terms to grab an icon from the theme. But they are few, and not even 'browser' or 'email' is under them.
  • The other method is to select an icon from the harddisk, which is made quite unintuitive (the filechooser should provide a list of directories read from XDG_DATA_DIRS). And, this path is fix then. A change of the icon theme can't change these icons too.
  • The better way would be to offer an ordered view of all possible default icon names (after freedesktop), by categories or common desktop terms (office,…)
• Can attach other dialogs, will be nice to can attach conky script to panel.

• The panel supports quick infos, it seems. However, they disappear after two seconds, and I don't know how to look through them afterward.

• Numbers for names in the panels' config dialog are confusing and can lead to deleting the wrong one.

• Add apt-watch applet support for Debian Etch. File a feature request at your favorite distro, this is NOT Xfce's task. Or maybe write your own plugin…

• Add a delay for the autohide option. The GTK menu popup delay is 225ms.

• Support RGBA windows in the panel.
  • Change 'Transparency' so that it only works on the background.
• Support for fake transparency, so people with bad video cards can have a transparent panel without composite. People with bad video cards shouldn't use transparency nor shadows…

• Create an add new items dialog like Firefox. Maybe with some ExoToolbars inspiration.

• Completely hide the panel when autohide is enabled.
  • Not a good idea, because it is nice to see the line and know where they are. Unless the user is given a toggle option for that particular purpose. - KitchM

• Use fixed sizes for the panel, like 16, 32, 48, 64. Those sizes should actually represent the size available by the launcher icon, to prevent fuzzy icons.
  • This would force users using SVG icons to use a specific size.
  • It would IMHO be a bad idea to implement this, especially with hard coded values based on common icon sizes. Not least considering that plugins like the Launcher, Xfce Menu, and Mail Watcher places their icons within a GtkButton, which results in some border around the icons, essentially making the area available to icons smaller than the panel size. It would be better to fix issues with fuzzy icons in the plugins; I personally likes this solution, even though I think the result from the gtk_icon_theme_get_icon_sizes function should be used instead of hard coded icon size values (if this gets implemented, please consider to watch the icon theme for changes by connecting to the “changed” signal, and redo the icon size if needed).

• Wrap the panel.
  • Maybe it's better to allow 2 (or more) panels on 1 edge of the screen.
  • Another good idea would be to allow “stacking” of panels by providing a “snap-to” toggle so that the botton edge of one would attach to the top edge of another and allow them to auto-hide together. Most of the time the panel is just too darn small to get everything on one. But then one has multiple panels at different edges of the screen and they create mouse navigation problems. - KitchM

• Improve theming of the panel. This is partly done by setting widget names, so you can change their layout in the gtkrc file.

• Alternative ways for setting the wallpaper.
  • Command line option.
  • DND image on the desktop. Choose the action when dropping when desktop icons are enabled.
  • A panel icon like the trash to set and store wallpapers

• Add option to disable panel! Just don't start it then! (quit the panel and log out saving your session)
  • You can do this by installing “xscreensaver” in your system. Nonsense(?)

• Drag and Drop items directly in the panel. For example: DnD a .desktop file between items to create a launcher.
  • Dragging an item to an 'auto-hidden' panel opens that panel. fixed in svn
  • I tried to drag an application to a panel from the Application Finder but it didn't pull up the panel nor did it drop into place on an open panel. 4.6.1 - KitchM

• Resize a 'auto-hidden' panel according to content

• Make the pager-plugin compatible to Beryl. I like the visual pager very much, because it makes working very easy. However I like beryl also very much, because it makes working funnier… fixed in svn (?)

• Add a pager option to disable the display of icons

• Check mouse position and collapse a auto-hidden panel if the mouse is not on the panel

• Full size panels should not overlap each other (on a screen corner). That's something about usability I suppose ;)

• A global (per panel) switch to disallow plugins to expand the panel.

• Add option to change panel background, and make possible to use difference backgrounds in some pannels, what KDE can`t do
  • Would be nice if a transparent background image would set panel transparent, too.
  • Would be great if the background settings like in Terminal would be added.

• Add rounded corners and thin-and-configurable border to the panel.

• Add native fish-eye effect when rolling over panel's icons and boxes.

• Possibility of causing that plugins works interlocked in the panel, or the System tray. For example, to cause that xfce4-clipman-plugin appears in the system tray. (But even that in 4.5.x can be hidden.). Being able to also use it of like always in the panel.
  • .. and to be able to do it with libxfcepanel
• Use seperate controls for panel transparency, and panel text/icons transparency. This would create a look as if the icons were embedded on the desktop.
  • add a slider to adjust panel's background only
  • add a tick to select panel's color
• Toggle option (Bug 3856).

• Two or more panels on the same side (two panels in bottom of screen for example; one for launch applications and other for listing all actual windows). Gnome can do that, why not xfce?

• Please consider adding a simple modification of unhiding behavior for people annoyed by a panel popping up when the cursor accidentally crosses the sensitive area - see patch posted at https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=263607. This could probably be easily integrated with panel properties.
• (Re)Add an option to allow other windows to cover the panel, like in KDE.
  • Like in Xfce3 and the early versions of xfce4. Why this was disabled is beyond me. No, using devilspie is not a user friendly option.

• Let me delete files directly, every other filemanager can do this!
  • Shift-delete does this.
    • let me please add this to the dropdown menu
• The ability to drag a selection box and select files in detailed view
  • This works in 1.0.1
• Ability to change the icons and emblems in the bookmarks-sidebar
• Add an Option to display the xdg-menues in sidebar(Ability to use thunar like osx-finder)
• Show the properties of more than one selected file/folder at the same time, it will make easy to know the size of some folders without see the individual proprierts and calculate by hand the total size (Bug #1879).
• Show the size of the folder and the size of its content when selecting a folder, instead of only the size of the folder itself… isn't very useful know the some bytes size of the folder.
• Some way to use the side pane as “tree” and “shortcuts” at the same time, maybe dividing the side pane in the half if you select both ways at the same time. I realy enjoy using tree mode, but have some shortcuts for most-accessed folders is extremely useful and I think loads of people would enjoy it.
• Make tree side pane behavior more similar to the main pane: Allow dragging and dropping of folders (to copy and move). Show the custom actions (open terminal, etc).
• Add tree-view-like folder expansion to the main pane. (Make it configurable on/off for people who don't like the behavior.)
• Add support for mount fixed disks (like gnome) in side pane not only removable disks.
• Allow user to add specified devices to side pane; eg, from etc/fstab. With configurable mounting method (eg, ntfs-3g vs other methods)
• Make exo-mount import hal options like utf8, …
• Allow exo-mount to override fs types. Example: gnome volume manager does this by default on Debian for ntfs –> ntfs-3g if you have it installed.
• Just a few small things to make life easier - mostly taken from rox-filer
  • Auto-fit window when entering a directory, and double click refresh and auto-fit.
  • Right-click on toolbar buttons to perform the action in a new window, e.g right-click refresh opens another window for the same directory. (I would expect ctrl+click to open in a new window. I think most people expect a menu to popup when they right-click on the toolbar. Maybe a menu could be added to the toolbar with the option to open the new window an item in the menu.)
  • Option to drag from Firefox to a window and download the file, more useful than a link?, using wget or similar.
  • Obviously not going to happen anytime soon but integration of compressed file navigation into the file manager (this could be more of a volman thing).
  • Key shortcuts to execute custom actions, e.g. ~ to “Open Terminal Here”
  • A way to execute a single shell command in the current directory.
    • If this means what I think it means, you can use the following custom action (all on one line; make it apply to directories only; test it with something non-destructive like “mkdir test”): CUSTOM_COMMAND=$(zenity --entry --title "Custom Command" --text "Enter command you would like to execute:") ; xfce4-terminal --working-directory=%f -x $CUSTOM_COMMAND
• leaftag support!
• A detailed view without icons and smaller vertical distance.
• Make plugins more accessible and easier to enable or disable. When I right click an .iso file, I get four different cd-burning related menu options, the standard “open with” set and two apparently thunar-specific options “burn image” and “open project”. The last two appear to belong to a plugin, but I can't find it. If they're not part of some plugin, there should be an option to disable them because I don't need the redundancy.
• Organization features: as many of the target audience are on older machines that can not handle Compiz/Beryl, it would be neat to have some other window-organization features available. Namely tabbed navigation, and/or possibly a column view similar to that of a Mac Finder.
• Not to show the archives that appear in ”.hidden”. Something that works until in gtkfilechoser.
• Tabs support
• Can change background of content window
• Small front-end to mkfs - right-clicking on usb drive provides format drive option in menu.
• Split window support(two pane like MC, Windows Total Commander) like KDE Dolphin
• … and whilst we're mentioning Dolphin, how about an Open/Edit As Root option. I find it tedious to go to a command line when I need to edit something (xorg.conf for instance) or when drag 'n drop is all you should need to copy something. I understand the security benefits of restricted privileges, but open terminal → sudo this that and the other; pain in the proverbial. Obviously Open/Edit as root will open a password prompt allowing only the admin to do, well, admin stuff.
  • What you want is to install a desktop entry file with the command prefixed by gksudo or the like. Copy the original desktop entry file from /usr/share/applications to ~/.local/share/applications and edit it. Don't forget to change the name to ”<Application> as root”. Repeat this task for each application that you are used to run as root.
• Gvfs support.
• is it nice to have some ready to go custom actions or a hint to http://thunar.xfce.org/pwiki/documentation/custom_actions or something like that? you can make greate functions :)
• Link in Configure custom actions to a wiki page with lots of custom actions (per above!)
• Finder-like column view in Thunar: Column_View thunar - it is simple and faster than Nautilus, but after i have experience on finder, I think it is useful for most of us switching in different folder.”especially when you want to move a file several levels up.
  • Visual representation of 2D filetree in 2D » 1D list, icon or tree view.
  • relate1 relate2
  • Test implementation
• Incorporate (whether graphically or in a .conf file somewhere) the ability to tell Thunar not to generate thumbnails for files bigger than a specified size http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4460. Other possible work-arounds (I'm not a programmer): child-process-control where Thunar makes sure convert does not cause a thrash condition, or giving the child process a specified amount of time before it is killed, etc.
• grep-box to filter current directory.
• Integrate file search to Thunar's context menus. See: New Modules > xffind/xfsearch.
• When Thunar is closed the “show hidden files” option should be reset (= set to false).
• Add Dropbox integration to Thunar.

• See also xfwm4 changes
• Improve accessibility
  • Keyboard
    • Make application shortcuts globally configurable, so, for example, F1 can be globally unassigned from providing “help” without having to configure each application individually. (F1 is close to ~, !, @, and Esc on laptop keyboards, all of which are more frequently used than “Help”. Accidentally pressing F1 is a major annoyance when trying to type and email or cd to the home directory.)
    • Make window manager and keyboard shortcuts take precedence over application defined shortcuts.
    • Option to choose whether a key shortcut is “maskable” or not. For example, F11 is commonly used to toggle fullscreen, but some applications might have other meaning for that key; thus F11 might be marked as maskable - application can capture it before window manager (xfce) does. But, for example, Super+F11 might be marked as unmaskable and no application can catch it - it just makes what it is configured to do in xfce. (Does it solve “taking precedence” mentioned above?)
    • If a shortcut already exists when a user tries to assign it (eg, F1), notify and request disabling it before reassignment.
    • xfce-setting-show → Window Manager → Keyboard
      • Key binding for killing the application (Alt + F4).
      • Key binding to popup the window menu (Alt + Spacebar).
      • Cycle through workspaces, like Alt + Tab for applications.
    • volume control and other weird buttons on newer keyboards. Does a command exists that controls these functions (and provides a nice osd indicator), that can just be assigned a keyboard shortcut?
      • This kind of controls sends an ascii code that is not recognized/accepted by the current shortcuts setup window.
    • Allowing more than one hotkey (key shortcut) for operations.
    • Add an option to treat similar modifier keys (left/right ctrl, shift, windows, etc.) the same way. E.g. when I bind my windows key to the root menu, only the left window key works. The right one does nothing. And vice versa.
  • Mouse
    • Don't give focus on mouse wheel.
    • Edge resistance of mouse cursor when it hits the edge of the screen on multimonitor systems. This will, among other things, make dragging scrollbars of maximized windows easier.
    • Customize mouse button actions. Add it to current keyboard shortcut ability.
    • Show the location of the cursor on the screen by doing Alt + Rightclick (some some customizable keyboard/mouse shortcut).
    • Shortcut to hide the cursor from the screen or move it to the bottom-left corner. Could be useful when you're typing and the cursor is in front of your text. (This could be provided as a program or script that moves the mouse cursor to some specified location, then assigned a keyboard shortcut.)
    • Raise window under mouse cursor on keypress.
• Window Management
  • Intelligent placement is annoying. The configuration of more or less intelligence is also not intuitive in this respect. please, allow for turning that feature off and having windows always pop up at center or do it more intelligent, like not opening the window at all but only registering it as a taskbar-entry or a temporary desktop (tray) icon.
  • Placeable “guides” a'la inkscape/gimp, which act as window separators, for example if you place a guide in the middle of your screen, a window that is maximised is maximused to take up the area of the sash where the window's centre is.
  • XFWM should respect sloppy mode while DnD and give focus to the target window.
  • xfce's strength is it's simplicity. sometimes, however, it doesn't behave … whenever there are popup-panels (e.g. during an update process), those panels come up again and again. I'd like to focus (my brains) only on the window I'm currently focused (window-wise) on. (Please correct me, if you can toggle this in some setting already…)
  • Maybe it would be nice if the Windowmanager could snap to the corners of other windows, that, when I`m moving a window witch is already snapped to another would snap to the x or y position of the other one.
  • If a application doesn't close within <x> seconds after trying to close it, prompt the user if he wants to kill the app.
  • Option to exclude empty workspaces (empty as in: no non-pager, non-taskbar … application on the workspace) from the cycle list.
  • Show the size of a window when resizing. + also show screen location information (in pixels). Make both optional.
  • Hide also the window border when a window is shaded.
  • Add the ability to do automatic resize to feet/inches/cm on the screen (as done in Icewm). Press Alt-XX and all windows are resized to equal size vertically or horizontally.
  • Add a new placement style (as in Golem). If you move the mouse during placement, the window sticks to the mouse. When the mouse stops moving for <x> seconds the window is placed under the mouse.
  • Actually focus windows when switching between them with Alt+Tab.
    • Make this configurable/user selectable
    • Raise the window instead of showing the border.
    • Show all windows in a grid while using Alt+Tab, like Exposé does.
  • Allow selecting application with mouse, when Alt+Tab is pressed and list of running applicatin is shown.
  • Group windows, so you can close and resize an entire group or (similar) windows.
  • An option to hide window decorations behind other windows but not hide the windows themselves. Sounds a bit odd, but it would mean even less clutter where screen real-estate is an issue. Bringing the window decorations back could be done with alt+click.
  • Possibility to maximize a window in the “free” desktop space (so without covering other windows). This will be useful for applications like the Gimp.
  • Visual display of margins when editing them.
  • Allow alteration of transparency per window.
  • Add button 'always on top' to current buttons (minimize, maximize, stick, shade, close) in title panel.
  • Add Amiga OS style z-order toggle button. (Logic: If the window is anywhere other than at the front of the z-order, bring it to the front, otherwise, send it to the back.)
  • Add buttons for 'maximize vertically' and 'maximize horizontally'
  • Add a possible 'maximize vertically' action to be executed when the window bar is clicked on.
  • Add “spacer” for the titlebar, so it is possible to, e.g., separate the close button from the rest without moving them to the opposite sides of the title (for example, like in KDE4)
  • when “minimising all” windows, I actually mean all windows within the current desktop …
  • Limited tiling window management. It can cost a lot of work, but I consider it as very useful thing.
    • Intelligent placement could behave differently:
      • Windows could be created not only on center, but e.g. on bottom (user defines).
        • in moment a solution can be a running daemon names devilspie or something else.
      • If there is insufficient place to create new non-overlapping window, some small windows could be moved.
    • Keyboard shortcuts to place window in chosen corner, but with respect for other windows - after placement none windows overlap.
    • User create WindowGroup - e.g. all GIMP windows would be one group. Group have main-window and only this window have visible decoration (windows within a group don't have it). All windows (subwindows?) within a group would be dockable. In group window subwindows would behave like in tiling window manager, but it would be great if some subwindows could overlap.
      • It would be awesome if group layout could be saved in file and maybe automatically restored.
    • The “fill” feature, I guess, is all what you need. You can have a vertical maximized application on the right side of your screen, move a terminal on the left and maximize it only in the available space – it will be maximized against the borders of the neighbor windows, and the more you maximize (fill) the more it expands against other windows. The default keyboard shortcuts for maximize are Alt+F5/6/7 IIRC, I have set my keyboard shortcuts for filling to Shift+Alt+F5/6/7. – mike
  • Ability to keep windows in a specific workspace. For example, if I have my browser open in workspace #1 and I click a link inside my IM client (in workspace #2), i want the link to open in the running browser but I don't want the browser to move to the current workspace. This could either be a global setting or an option for each window (like Stick).
• Dynamic workspaces.
  • Settings → Workspace type → %Toggle% Dynamic/Fixed → Dynamic → Grey out options (number of workspaces).
  • User starts with 1 workspace.
  • New workspaces get added when the user tries to place a window on a workspace which doesn't yet exist (using keyboard shortcuts for example).
  • Workspaces (except for workspace 1) 'collapse' when the user closes the last remaining app on a workspace.
  • New workspace can be created when user tries to change focus to a workspace that doesn't exist (useful for trying to access the desktop), if the current workspace is not already empty.
  • <Winkey>+'D' - Minimize/maximize all windows
  • One thing I liked about compiz was the scale plugin; I think it's expose on Mac OS-X. For me it was just a flick of the mouse to the upper right corner and there was all my open windows from all workplaces. Don't need all that other stuff that compiz has, but something like scale is very handy, or even Shift Switcher.
  • How about skipping over empty workspaces when switching using the Ctrl-Alt-Arrow keys?
• Themes
  • Allow for translucency in themes. This could allow both transparent window decorations as well as an easy way to make theme-specific effects such as drop shadows.
  • More flexible way to use current Gtk color scheme in decorations. For example, by using grayscale png images, tinted by specified color (by mapping white to this color, leaving black as is, or vice versa, as specified in themerc). Multiple png layers would bring full benefit.
  • Allow themes to have alternate decorations when maximized vs. not maximized. Ex. rounded window corners when not maximized, square when maximized. - this is implemented
  • Customizable position of the window buttons. Like with tabs (top, bottom, left, right).
  • Make a tool to import metacity themes.
  • Improved theme installation. Could be done by automatically install a theme when the tarball is dragged in the properties dialog or a special button.
• Eye-candy and compositing effects
  • Disabling transparency for single windows would be great. It is very annoying if you are watching a video with mplayer for example while doing every day work so the mplayer window (video) looks pallid because of the transparency. To enable/disable this feature for every window there could maybe an option in the xfwm window menu (where you also can stick/hide/etc. the window).
  • OpenGL based window/compositing manager. Not for wobbly windows, but for speeding up the window manager.
    • Comment: This isn't something that should be hacked around in Xfwm4. Render needs to be speeded up in Xorg, benefiting all applications.
    • Forget wobbly windows and other useless eye-candy (if you want that rubbish, use Beryl). But there are several useful things that could be done, like blur-behind transparency
  • Make sure effects can be individually disabled (for people who are easily distracted or with slower computers)
  • Provide a visual representation of window being shaded/rolled-up. The current action of instantly shading is unintuitive to someone who doesn't know what that feature is.
  • Provide animated/mouseover images for minimize/close/etc buttons implemented in svn
  • Transparency should only apply to inactive (no focus) applications … now, when a new window pops up in the browser the main-browser-window gets transparent and thats a bit confusing . So don't make parent-widgets transparent when child-widget appears.
  • Provide miniature of windows when pressing <Alt-Tab> if compositing is active, like metacity now does. I know that something similar could be done using skippy-xd (if you manage to have it working) or kompose, but the result is not nice (fonts are different, etc,etc)
  • Posibility to use diferent shadows settings (radius,deltas,opacity,…) for maximized,minimized,tooltips,panel,…
  • A zoom feature would be nice.

• Other
  • Could a plugin or module system be added to xfwm? Scriptable plugins (python, scheme, or some such) could provide a nice easy way for people to pare down this wish list.
    • Imho a plugin interface would add unreasonable complexity to xfwm.
    • Actually it should be a main feature of a GUI Window Manager!
      • WM-Pluginwishes
        • A plugin resembling the put-plugin from compiz - Maybe this one can be an integrated feature. Especially if you don't like mice that much, you'll enjoy that. However I don't know the performance gap between xfwm4(-compositing) and compiz with just a few plugins, so somebody might tell me (in discussion or mail) if it makes sense to wish for such a plugin.

• Would it be possible to integrate the xfce4-appfinder into the xfce-menu?
  • not everyone would like only appfinder as mainmenu i think, but i like appfinder too. a solution can be to make a starter for app-finder and remove the standard xfce-menu from the panel. if you like it in a corner or anywhere else you can use a daemon like devilspie. with that xfce4-appfinder can started everytime on the same place and it looks like menu
  • It's not so difficult to implement it yourself! Start from: /etc/xdg/xubuntu/menus/xfce-applications.menu Everything nice formatted and human-readable xml

• Alternative ways for setting the wallpaper.
  • Command line option.
    • It's avaible in 4.6 with: `xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p /backdrop/screen0/monitor0/image-path -s /home/user/yourimage`

NOTE: For serious feature requests, please file bugs at http://bugzilla.xfce.org/ and mark the severity as 'enhancement'. I don't read this page often and I don't have the time/energy to keep track of things outside of Bugzilla. –kelnos

• please add a option to use bold text

• Allow file icons on the desktop *and* application launchers in the top level of the desktop right-click menu, at the same time. Xfce 4.4 allowed this. 4.6 apparently does not.

• Icons should allow for single click. The title could pop up at a longer mouseover. (bug #1797)

• Dragging a link from the browser onto the desktop should allow for the download of the source file.
  • Xfdesktop is not a network browser. –kelnos

• Let different workspaces have different backgrounds. Could be done by setting the background in the workspace settings. (bug #369)
  • This is doable, but would make switching workspaces very slow on most systems. Of course, people don't have to use the feature if it's too slow. –kelnos

• Customize mouse button actions, so you can change which menu pops up on a specific mouse button.

• Add option to disable the icons in the desktop menus, instead of using the gtk-menu-images = false setting.
  • Option is back in 4.6.

• Root window terminal, so the entire background is covered with a terminal emulator.
  • Xfdesktop is not a terminal emulator. –kelnos

• Simple 'fake' shadow effect for text labels. (same text+font @ 1px offset)
  • Implemented for 4.6. See xfdesktop README.

• Separate opacity for selected and non-selected item labels.
  • Implemented for 4.6. See xfdesktop README.

• When a folder on the desktop is right-clicked, a “Desktop” submenu is available (create launcher, etc). Allow customization and ability to add this submenu to the normal desktop menu (xfdesktop –menu).
  • Customization isn't on my TODO list, but I'm definitely planning on doing something similar with the main desktop menu. –kelnos

• Allow animated backgrounds with .mng/.gif images
  • God, no. –kelnos
  • When looking at ristretto, I can say you DON'T EVER want a full-screen 1600×1200 animated background-image. It will most likely be the only thing your computer will be good for then. Showing wallpapers…. Therefore I can only agree with kelnos on this. -stephan
    • let the users decide
    • Yes, it is always preferrable to allow the user to set any setting they could ever desire. Unfortunately, adding that functionality is probably quite low on the developer's list. (But I still always push for it.) - KitchM

Screens of mini pc's with 7 - 10 ” aren't 1600×1200 and one little Gif/Mng, in the middle of the screen …. not sure it would low the system that much . But that's ok, i stop to search a way.

• Thumbnails on the desktop. Yes, just like nautilus. (bug #4344)
  • Of image files? Sounds good to me. –kelnos

• Drop the grid that block the freedom to move the desktop icons.
  • That requires a rewrite of most of the desktop view widget. It's on my TODO list, but won't happen any time soon. –kelnos

• … or at least make it possible to configure the spacing
  • Configurable spacing implemented for 4.6. See xfdesktop README.

• I put in question if XFCE could drop desktop icons–and possibly even panel support–in favour of a generalized 'cupboard' app coming around like a window of free space to assort 'things'. Users would have more control over (window and content) size, placement and order.

• Launcher icons && minimized window icons (simultaneously)
  • I don't really like this idea. Then you need to somehow indicate that they're different. How? A special icon? Sounds weird. A special color? What color? How does that interact with the gtk theme? –kelnos

• An option to have Thunar pop up a new window on desktop double-click. Proved to be extremely useful.
  • Interesting… I like this. –kelnos
  • On second thought, kinda unintuitive. There's nothing that would make you think a double-click on the desktop should open the desktop in a new window. Might add a “open in new window” item to the desktop context menu, though. –kelnos

• A modifier key to keep the desktop menu open after selecting an item.
  • Not possible - gtk controls menu behavior, and changing this behavior is not only difficult, but bad for usability. –kelnos

• Add a titlebar to desktop menu.
  • What's a titlebar? –kelnos

• If there are no desktop icons, make dragging image files to the desktop change the wallpaper.
  • Sounds good. –kelnos

• Auto-refresh for xfdesktop (As opposed to hitting F5 every time somthing happens to /home/user/Desktop)
  • You need to have gamin or FAM installed, and thunar-vfs needs to be compiled to support it. If you're using FAM, the 'famd' daemon needs to be running. –kelnos

• Marquee selecting for icons; moving one icon at a time gets old fast
  • Implemented for 4.6.

• Add option to arrange or keep icons arranged on the desktop.

• Optional inclusion of Novell SLED 10 desktop menu (or new XFCE version using similar design goals) as replacement for standard desktop menu.
  • We don't do distro-specific stuff. Distros are free to customise the menus they ship as they see fit, though. –kelnos

• Add a option which makes it possible to extract the menu-toolbar from any window and place it into a given panel where only the menu-toolbar of the currently active window is displayed. This would be similar to the mac os. In my opinion it increases the usability of an os extremely. Especially for notebook users and computer with small screens this option comes in handy. When many windows are displayed on the screen, lots of place is being occupied by the the menu-toolbar which on the other hand reduces the area for a window to actually display its content. It will also be easier for the user to access the menu, since the cursor only needs to be moved to the panel (which is on the edge of the screen). For some people it is hard to move the cursor using a touchpad or track pointer to any point on the screen. It is easier to just throw the cursor onto an edge or into a corner.
  • This has nothing to do with xfdesktop. This turns out to be very difficult to do, and requires support from the toolkit (gtk). There are a few patches floating around (try Google), but they're rather hackish and unreliable (i.e., some apps crash when you use them). –kelnos

• Arranging icons in desktop just like KDE-refresh desktop/Gnome-cleanup by name.

• I'm sure this has been asked before (and countless times), but… what about allowing an external program to draw the background? Right now the only way to have eg.: xsnow or xplanet, is to disable xfdesktop completely, which means the drawing program is not aware of the screen space occupied by panels, and the compositor is not aware there is actually a background behind, thus showing a plain dull grey “failsafe background”. — Luis Machuca B.
  • These apps can draw properly on the xfdesktop window if they can accept a parameter to take the window ID of xfdesktop's window.
  • Xfdesktop in 4.6 also supports a “transparent” mode that makes the entire desktop window transparent, except for the icons. This requires a compositing manager running, though, which means you won't be able to see xsnow (etc.) anyway, because xfwm4 (at least) doesn't draw the root window at all.

• Automatically change wallpapers once in a while.
  • You can do this by creating a brackdrop list and adding xfdesktop to a cron job (using crontab -e).

• Remove the white transparent area around the icons text.
  • This is themable in 4.6. See the xfdesktop README.

• There should be an option so that when minimizing applications to the desktop they can be removed from the task list. Eg in this mode the task list would contain unminimized applications and all your minimized applications would be on the desktop.

• desktop file settings dialog should look like the thunar one(lets me choose emlems etc)

• Support for enlightenments(E17) animated backgrounds(or support for *.mng's)

• Same behaviour as Thunar when editing filename : select the filename without the extension

• maybe use thunar to display the desktop, this can fix the the behavior or the display of thumbnails

• support for to use picturefeeds as wallpaper, like http://feeds.feedburner.com/ngpod

• Xfce needs one as an official component, its a shame that some Xfce-Distributions comes with gdm as display manager
• maybe someone can fork lxdm or slim…

• Completion of commands, not only already typed commands.
  • Use the same history+back-end as the “Verve Command Line” goodie.
• A GUI to run as a different user if in the 'wheel' group.
  • You can use gksu -u <username> <command>
• When opening a new run command dialog, it opens empty instead of with the last typed command.
  • Is this a wish for an option or does this sometimes happen to you and you think it's a bug? The last command should be selected when xfrun4 comes up so just start typing if it isn't what you want.
• Can show big (64×64 or better 128×128) icon of typped command, and may be a comment if it`s a .desktop
• show button icon only when gtk-button-images is set to true
• Why needs this dialog a minimize & maximize button?

• Support for syntax highlighting. Possible backends are Scintilla or gtksourceview. (don't rely on backends, make a small library just for mousepad, perhaps plugins for mousepad? create another emacs with a billion plugins?… nah. mousepad works just fine. open up GVIM or XEMACS if you want syntax highlighting. *don't reinvent the wheel*)
  • I disagere. Mousepad is nice, but virtually useless to me since it doesn't have syntax highlighting. I want to do development, but I can't stand emacs, and vim is too cryptic. - Use Geany or Scite then
  • Although I agree to not reinvent the wheel, I think mousepad could use a little bit more programmer friendly features. (syntax highlighting is going a little far)
  • I disagree with sytax highlightning. For that we have NEdit (if we want to go with light software). I think better improvements would be the ability to call an external progra to process the file (eg.: what about a 'sed-in-place' option?). — Luis Machuca B.

• Tabs

• GTKspell

• Keep mousepad as fast as it is now (I'm using 0.2.12), no need to bloat it with features. Sometimes I wonder if it actually is a gtk+ 2 application, because it feels even faster than xterm. It starts instantaneously on my duron 800, I wish every application would start as fast (even the “about xfce” dialog box takes longer to start). Great job!

• UTF-16 support

• Encrypt-Decrypt for text formatted as base64 hex and so on

• Make it possible to use a different font in individual tabs and / or windows, without changing the general font setting.
  • Ideally, implement customizable profiles, which have some settings different from the default. A user would (optionally) choose a profile when opening a new tab or a terminal window. This could be done for example by holding down the left button for a second, or right clicking, on the new tab button, or via the menus. See other terminal emulators to see how this has been done. This would be a more general solution and would allow users to use all kind of settings in their profiles, not just setting the font.
• Make the amount that is scrolled in history via mouse wheel configurable
• When i switch to a non-latin keyboard layout, the various CTRL shortcuts (CTRL-A, CTRL-E etc.) no longer work (bug #3037).
• Option to be docked as some end of screen.
• Option to blink the terminal window when an exectued command is finished (bug #5514).
• What about searching the scroll-back buffer? It proves to be very useful to me (bug #3649).
• Hide mouse pointer while typing.
  • It is a hidden option, c.f. MiscMouseAutohide in ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc
• Ability to split terminal window, much like konsole in kde 4
• make it themeable(set a default bgcolor/textcolor over gtkrc

• Documentation of how it does what it does (what is the effect) and how to use it for theming.
• Relief GTK Notebook tabs.
• Improve support for QT themes. Maybe by creating a Plastic like theme or some layer between them. - I think this already exists QGTKStyle exists, makes QT applications looks just like your current GTK theme http://labs.trolltech.com/page/Projects/Styles/GtkStyle
• please add real transparency to insensitive stockicons & fontshadows(the ugly white shadow), (crux, magichicken, aurora & clearlooks can do this)

• Add support for printing PDF/Postscript files.
• Printing via Samba shared printers.
• Add the possibility to print odd/even pages, for those printers which need manual duplex
• Add ability to scan for and configure network printers (Will take a lot of work.)

• more apps/integrate all settings listet in the settings-menu

• add a tool to manipulate groups & users

• a tool for PolicyKit settings

• integreate gsynaptics

• please use 64x64px icons instead of 48×48(48 looks so small in 1920)
  • Shouldn't users have a choice instead of making it just for one person's taste? - KitchM
    • let me set this xfce4-settings-editor?

• xfstart – Utility to start applications with certain WM_HINTS set.
  • Similar applications are ksstart, bblaunch and bbapconf.
  • Benny has some unfinished code for this.

• xfwmdock – somewhere for windowmaker dockapps to live (run) in their normal style.

• xfdock – Minimize applications to the system tray.
  • Danny has started working on this.
  • Andre has started too.

• xfdm – A graphical login for the Xfce desktop environment.
  • Custom animated login from .gif or .mng similar to enlightenment`s login manager.
  • You can use the SLiM login manager.
  • Create a simple theme changer for slim.

• Themer for XDM

• xfview – A simple image viewer, with possible database backend.
  • psyBSD started working on this.
    • ristretto?
      • I think ristretto needs function “save”. For example not possible save image after rotation.
• xfbrowse – A gtk-webcore, dillo or gecko based internet browser. * This is way too much work for our relative small development team. * And a waste of effort. Seing that there's a current for cross desktop development, what would be the advantage? Better HIG compliance? Better XDG compliance? These are already being worked on…
  • See modori (http://software.twotoasts.de/?page=midori) Very alpha version.. With webkitgtk.

• xfmail – A small and easy to use mail reader.
  • It's possible to use the Tinymail framework for this.
  • There are already Sylpheed and Claws Mail.
  • Sylpheed has no support for proxies, also not with tsocks. Both Sylpheed and Claws are open source - expand it if it doesnt meet your requirements!
• xfsudo – Application like gksu for running programs that need root access. - try gksudo

• xfsu – su(no sudo) frontend without gnome-deps(can this included in xfrun?/checkbox run as root?).

• xflog – Simple log viewer.

• xfchat – Another IRC client. There are numerous IRC clients out there. There must be something you like?

• xfxmpp – A Xfce Jabber Client, small, simple and fast

• xfscribes – Xfce(or generic GTK2) Clone of the Gnome scribes Code editor, it is just genius, but written in python with pyGnome(requires complete gnome)

• xfradmin – Integrated remote desktop administration like a VNC or KDE`s radmin

• xfdesklets – Xfce frontend for adesklets

• xftruecrypt – Xfce frontend for truecrypt with /home and /root partitions

• xffind/xfsearch – File search utility. It could simply be a front-end for the unix find utility which is available in virtually every *nix system. Searching for a specific pattern inside a file could also be done, through grep, using find's -exec parameter. To make it even more useful, it could be integrated to Thunar's context menus.

• Ruby Bindings for the Xfce desktop environment.
• PHP Bindings for the Xfce desktop environment.

• Be able to switch user, ie. the programs one is running will still run in the background.
  • How about a way to open a new login window inside a desktop? Gnome development reference here
• Xfce is a popular desktop choice on the PS3, it would be cool if the session manager had an option to run in “PS3 mode” where one of the exit choices would be “boot to game OS”, running the ps3-boot-game-os command, saving a(nother) run through the boot loader after reboot, and putting the ps3-boot-game-os operation into a more logical place, instead of just being another app.

• Have an option to send a wall message on alarms. (Yes, there are (still) ppl who like to work in the real terminal mode. And no, sound is not an option.)
  • This is already possible in Orage 4.5. It has alarm-type “Procedure” where you can run any os command.
• make it skinnable(non-static icon)

• Create a multimedia library, with support for audio and video (encoding and decoding). I know there are other libs around like ffmpeg, but it sucks, the api is not documented, it will never be stable, etc… Just a simple lib with support for the most common audio formats (wav,mp3,ogg,flac) and video formats (avi,mpg,ogm).
  not something xfce as a project will ever do…
• Add more functionality to xfmedia, like subtitles, and managment of playlists, may be and interface like as kaffeine
  • and please let me choose the audio track
    • make it skinable like gmplayer or the xine ui

ok this is minor, but it would be great to add more theming support, maybe a fully configurable engine based on gtk, with different options(use icons like the kdesplash, or use a progressbar, animation support(continuous displayed image like the thobbber or a mng(to display images like the default mouse splash or the moodin-engine under kde)

• Add support for password protected 7zips
• Add support for ISOs
• the default compression schould maximum(brings me 60% smaller 7z-archives)
• load xarchiver-html, xarchiver-add & xarchiver-extract from freedesktop-icontheme

• A new modern looking Icon-theme
  • How about using and working together with the Tango Project?
    • hm i think tango ist to gnome specific whats about oxygen? or create a complete new one

• own theme format, like compiz *.emeralds(renamed *.tgzs), maybe *.xfguikit/*.xfkit….
  • Why? many gnome-gtk-themes not to 100% compatible with xfce…
  • oneclick themeinstall

• Better artwork - most of the current artwork looks very old and unprofessional

• Aimed (mainly) for Midori and Epiphany users:
• (and, even, Arora, Konqueror and Firefox)
• a GTK+ application for managing BOOKMARKS/HISTORY (from & for ALL web browsers formats, i.e. Epiphany/RDF, Mozilla/JSON/SQLITE, Midori/XBEL, HTML etc.)
• Firefox is well known HEAVY web browser (heavy… end of story!) which I don't like. Firefox also have a complicated/sophisticated bookmarking management containers which is primarily JSON for backup (and the old HTML and SQLite - click here to see more about places.sqlite) on which many people worldwide are relying on, including me. unfortunately there seem to be no other bookmarks managers around which handle the JSON or SQLite format

• please see these two posts: post Num1 & post Num2
• a lightweight (or separate) bookmarking management project is very needed to organize this precious data efficiently in low resources environment and eliminating this kind of dependency on Firefox.
• after days of searching, I found a similar project for windows operating systems.
• there is a project for bookmark managing called Chipmark which maybe can be a good back-end for this suggested project - maybe there is already a support for Firefox's JSON importing option (which was not published, yet)
• see also: http://www.chipmark.com:8082/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=444 (use google cache for the Chipmark site if it goes slow) - contact me: avner.sss (AT) gmmmmmmmmmail (DOT) commmmmmmmmmm (I'll open Xfce account soon)
  • Please see a little thread which summarizes this severe issue TPFC • View topic - SpeedyFox
    • Hello, this project is pretty old (QT3) http://sqlitebrowser.sourceforge.net/
    • and it seem to be that the folowing project is an XUL fork, see: http://code.google.com/p/sqlite-manager/

• you can't resist it ;)
• 1by1 - the directory player
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1by1
• http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=90
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=853799
• http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=3049
• It is officially supported by WineHQ < but (HELL!) I'm not going yo install WineHQ on my beautiful Xfce desktop < I'll get ReactOS someday though :P
  • MOC - music on console, does the job (not the same feeling, though) & it could be a good start-up for GUI development aimed for youth that are pretty nervous when it comes to Cli (command-line) interface or Console via a terminal emulator.

• Lightweight word processor. AbiWord is really buggy and not lightweight. I think of something much more lightweight and efficient. It would be nice it supported only one format (it could be ODT) for read & write and (x)HTML & PDF/PS output. This way, the developers could focus on something other than implementing closed and broken formats. ODT is gaining enough popularity these days anyways. Or one could add RTF as well. Second, the functionality should not compete with MS Word. This should be a basic word processor that allows you to just get the job done. XMPP connectivity and other things one can see in AbiWord these days are really abundant. — ilembitov
  • How about using an online web Office application for example like Google Docs (it's the only good one I know off-head). In the word processor you will obviously have to support OO-XML and OASIS OpenDocument which is a real hard MF task otherwise there is no point as you will be in a small nutshell being the only one able to read and save the documents. Perhaps a MS Wordpad-like application with RTF documents? For what's in my case, I'm a happy OOo user. But at last there are also Desktop-wiki applications like Zim and Tomboy that support wiki/camel syntax, and even standalone HTML files with javascript like Wiki on a stick and Tiddly wiki. — mike
    • Well, an online app can't really substitute a local one in this case (especially on a mobile device). Wordpad-like app is nice, but I don't really see any point in choosing RTF as default - the specification is pretty obscure and not really implemented correctly in contemporary MS products (although the spec is open, you still get compatibility issues). Second, I can't see a reason why choosing ODT would make it necessary to support OOXML as well. OOXML specs are enormous and intricated to my knowledge (although I am not really competent here). But you are right about WordPad (or Ted, in terms of functionality) - that's exactly what I want, just a little bit more contemporary and supporting a more recent standard as default. — ilembitov

some ugly facts:

• there are apps that can hide a menubar or a statusbar, like the terminal, other have no one or can't hide it.
• some apps & plugins does not use xfceheading eg: taskmanager, orange-clock other ones have a 1px border around it eg: xfce-battery-plugin
• some apps does not follow gtk-settings http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/unstable/GtkSettings.html
• some apps have a 5 or 10px border eg: Thunar, xfce-settings-manager(Why these here? there is a GtkWidget style option which can do this http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/unstable/GtkWidget.html#GtkWidget--s-draw-border , 2nd the windowmanager can do this

This isn't really helpful! Why? You have put up a list of “random” fact, you don't point to real problems. If you want to be helpful you will have to do a little more work, put up a list of apps and write down which dialogs have gui guidelines problems in your regard and we can look at it and fix it. What you seem to be suggesting right now is that “someone” has to look into it.
Personally I don't see why taskmanager is missing an XfceHeading as it is a window and not a dialog. OK the window is very rudimentary but so is the application, it only shows processes.
You don't seem to know what GtkSettings is about. Xfce provides an XSettings manager which means no applications have to use it except for some niche use-cases.
— Mike

• a small font viewer which can display a font and install them, but keep it simple(have a look at this http://www.blog.funkyimage.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/brucie_bonus.jpg)