A Fistful of (Minor) Gripes from a New User

While I am stoked to be using a cutting-edge, free, open-source operating system I have run into a few issues. I don’t know if I’d do better making an individual thread for each of these issues or not, but here goes!

  1. I used to use an Xfce, Debian-based distro where in the “save file” menu there was a “recently used” location in the left hand frame. I found this extremely time-saving when saving screen caps on many different topics. For part of the day I’m researching how to do my spark plug change, later on I’m saving some funny memes, and those health tips can’t be left to simply evaporate! Is there a way of adding this feature to my OS?

  2. The mouse cursor is too small and doesn’t respond to changing the settings.

  3. I don’t like how separate windows of the same program are nested into one tab on the panel. Multiple workspaces solves this issue of clutter - no need to do this! Is there a switch to change it back to normal?

  4. Number lock seems to be off by default… which makes my habit of going to the number pad not-so-efficient anymore.

  5. The Adiwata icon theme has a broken icon for the panel volume knob :disappointed_relieved:

Thanks for reading. Stay free!
:wave:

If there is, then it’ll be in the XFCE settings, but I don’t use XFCE, so I don’t know.

This is either way not anything Manjaro would be responsible for. Manjaro packages XFCE (and many other things), but XFCE is not being developed by us.

Try using a different mouse cursor theme, maybe?

Same comment as higher up, i.e. if there is a way of changing that behavior, then it’ll be in the XFCE settings somewhere.

I do not know whether XFCE has a setting for automatically turning on NumLock, but I suspect that it does. However, check whether you have the numlockx package installed.

For automatic NumLock in the tty sessions ─ i.e. outside of the GUI environment ─ you must install systemd-numlockontty from the AUR. :arrow_down:

pamac build systemd-numlockontty
sudo systemctl enable --now numLockOnTty

That is up to the Adwaita theme developer(s). Again, Manjaro does not develop that theme; we only offer it among our packages.

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@Aragorn Thanks for the speedy reply. It looks like I’ve got some Xfce manuals to read through :slight_smile:

If you’re using Manjaro’s stable branch then also take into account XFCE’s imminent update to version 4.16, which will bring a couple of changes as well…

The cursor size only works in larger steps. So while there is no difference when setting a size between 16 and 30, when you increase it further, the cursor becomes bigger after a certain step (this might also depend on the cursor theme I guess). So try some larger steps, like 31, 43, 50…

If you’re referring to Gtk3, which most applications are now using, this feature was part of GtkFileChooser in the past, but was removed.
Bug reports/feature requests:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751653
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=781819

I think that Gtk2 still has this feature in the “Save As” dialog window of GtkFileChooser, but Gtk2 has reached its end of life as mentioned here, which means that fewer applications are now using it.

To change this behavior right-click on the panel > Panel > Panel Preferences > Items (tab) > double-click the Window Buttons item > under Behaviour select Never for the option Window grouping.

The Arch Wiki has instructions on how to activate NumLock on bootup in Xfce:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Activating_numlock_on_bootup#Xfce

It’s a simple configuration in Settings Manager > Keyboard.


As for the rest of your questions, I think they were answered above.

Hope that helps!

3 - Window Buttons

Go to Panel Preferences > Items tab to access settings for Window Buttons

change Window grouping to Never

4 - Number Lock
try this

xfconf-query -c keyboards -p /Default/Numlock -t bool -s true
xfconf-query -c keyboards -p /Default/NumlockRestore -t bool -s true

1 - Recently used files
This feature in Thunar file manager has a bug and cannot open files properly
Add Support for GTK RECENT bookmark (#257) · Issues · Xfce / thunar · GitLab
If you really need this feature it might be better to consider using another file manager or another package that can support recent files better

YES we update from 4.14 to 4.16 THIS YEAR,… woo hoo :joy:

Well, it was introduced to unstable/testing last year, and there don’t seem to be major issues… but let’s not digress from the topic.

Thanks for the help, all! :smiley:

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