Xfce Design SIG (Special Interest Group)

The Xfce Design SIG aims at improving the usability and visual appearance of the Xfce desktop environment. Our goal is to bring interested users, designers and hackers together to ensure that none of them are working in a vacuum. By establishing a context in which they can collaborate on smaller and larger design-related projects, we try to increase the chance of the proposed changes to be merged into the official Xfce repositories.

Members of the Design SIG are not appointed or elected. Everyone can participate! Feel free to add your name, interests and skills to the following list if you are striving for regular contributions to our ongoing design efforts.

• xfce4-power-manager
  • Improvements for the Power Manager (Accepted, Started in Apr 2014)
• xfce4-profile-manager
  • Profile Manager for xfce (Accepted, Started in Oct 2011)
• xfce4-settings
  • Design interface for managing user accounts

• Thunar
  • Improvement of the Window Layout (Completed in May 2011)
  • Redesign of the Shortcuts Pane (Completed)
  • Simplify Thunar toolbar (Completed)
• xfce4-appfinder
  • Design of the xfce4-appfinder and xfrun4 merge (Completed)
• xfwm4-tabwin
  • Allow the Alt-Tab Window to be Themed (Completed)
• Session-menu/Action-buttons/Xfswitch plugin
  • Merge of the three plugins into one (Completed)
• Ristretto
  • Implement "folder concept" in ristretto (Completed)
  • Rework ristretto's application icon (Completed in Feb 2012)
• xfdesktop-settings
  • Improve xfdesktop's settings UI (Completed)
• xfce4-settings (Completed)
  • Improve handling of multiple displays
• Parole (Completed)
  • Improve Parole's UI

Here you can propose new UI-related projects for the Design SIG to work on. Please provide a title and a short description and maybe a link to mockups and related information.

• xfce4-settings: Merge some settings panels
  • Proposal — Simon Steinbeiß 2014/03/28 12:52
  • Proposal — Simon Ochsenreither 2017/09/28 12:00
• Thunar: Improve the file operation progress dialog — Jannis Pohlmann 2011/05/26 19:15
  • The current shared file operation progress dialog provides rather sparse information. It is not easy to decide what information should be displayed and how.
• Thunar: Add a persistent, editable UI to copy/move files — Jannis Pohlmann 2011/09/20 15:40
  • I've seen something like this in OS X recently: whenever drag-and-drop is initiated in Finder, a black drop area pops up at the edge of the screen. Files can be dropped there and users can later drag them from the area back into another folder or application. We could do something similar. Here are some ideas:
    • Have a simple D-Bus service that allows to store/retrieve a list of URIs (potentially grouped by an application or task specific ID). Have a standalone application or a panel plugin implement this to visualize the files that are in memory. Maybe split up the visualization into a “copy” and a “cut” area. In Thunar, add URIs to this storage if Ctrl+C/Ctrl+X are pressed or whatever other methods there are to initiate a copy/cut operation. Heck, maybe even allow arbitrary objects to be stored instead of just URIs, perhaps using a semantic temporary storage. We could also think about defining standard storage group IDs for common purposes. — Jannis Pohlmann 2011/09/20 15:40
• xfce4-session: Evaluate the session saving and resuming feature
  • Evaluate the usability of session saving (Started in Nov 2014)

• Thunar: Show free-space-status of devices in sidebar
  • Show free space indicator in Thunar's sidebar — Simon Steinbeiß 2012/01/03 13:50
• Clean up the theme and wallpaper collection. Include Shimmer themes in the collection. — Pasi Lallinaho 2011/06/22 22:56
  • I think that this can by a good solution for the gtk3-engine-xfce and the theme in gtk3, since nobody care for these component nor the theming, I think is good simply and for all select a non engine-dependant theme and whit popper maintainance. And make it the default.
• Design a good, default wallpaper for Xfce. — Pasi Lallinaho 2011/06/23 11:47
• Design a nicer mouse pointer, with curve borders
• in the tasklist, group task according to the workspace (when you display task for all workspace) — pops 2012/01/22 18:59
  • See here — pops
  • I second this propose. In my case every workspace has their own fuction (one for web, another for communication tools, third one for development tools and so on) and displaying applications according to the workspace makes it very fast and easy for me to find out the correct application. I'm currently using Tint2 (multi_desktop mode) instead of xfce-panel because of this feature. eyemonen 2012/12/04 12:46
• Change default window shadows
  • Xfwm4 window shadows are almost symmetrical, which doesn't look right with most of the Gtk themes. Also, many themes needlessly override these settings, preventing users from setting their own values. See https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8408 for more information. — Andrzej 2012/02/08 10:55
• Xfce4-session: Add options for gpg and ssh agent startup
  • Redesign the Advanced tab of Session and Startup to allow the user to select how to handle their gpg and ssh keys. eric_the_idiot 2015/02/15
• Menu bars: More consistency — Simon Ochsenreither 2017/09/28 12:00
  • Introduce setting to show/hide menu bar by default (probably using Gtk/ShellShowsMenubar underneath)
  • Introduce common shortcut to temporarily display menu bar (many non-Xfce applications use Alt for this purpose)