JDPFu.com 2025

Edit Configuration Files

If, you are not afraid of editing some files with a text editor, you can unleash amazing power for your environment and make it your own. If you’ve ever watched a UNIX guru work on his personal machine, you’ll see why we don’t really like mice. They are too slow most of the time and not needed, but many of us will make a few apps mouse-able for convenience when we aren’t tied to the keyboard. I have email, web browsing and and a few other programs directly click-able on the lxpanel on my desktop too. That list of programs includes a few remote shells to servers I use weekly.

LXWM Example

Since I don’t run Gnome, the article panel editing tool is not very useful to me, but for the sake of others that also run lxwm (from LXDE), you can quickly setup the same thing by manually editing some files – it is much quicker than pointing-n-clicking for 10 minutes to add a few commands.
First you need to create a “desktop” file for every command you want to use. I keep my custom xxx.desktop files together. Here’s an example to remote into another server.

$ more xt-dms44.desktop 
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=dms44-root
Comment=Xterm to root@dms44
Exec=/usr/bin/xterm -u8 -class UXTerm pre -sb -e ssh root@dms44
Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/xterm_32x32.xpm
Categories=System;Settings;

Then we just need to edit the lxpanel file here: /home/uid/.config/lxpanel/LXDE/panels/top_ and add it our menu.

Button {
    id=/usr/share/applications/xt-dms44.desktop
}

Control Fonts, Colors or anything known to X/Windows as a widget

The X/Windows system was designed to allow customization of almost everything you can see on the display. Everything. The width of handles that you can grab with a mouse, the color of those handles, where menus are displayed, how check boxes look, and even the fonts for every different text area that gets displayed. These settings are stored in resource files and can be set globally for all X/Windows programs or go down to the title font for a single program. There’s a hierarchy to the precedence that you’ll need to learn for more advanced uses. We’ll start easy with an xterm and controlling the fonts and forcing a scrollbar to be displayed.

Drop these settings into your $ vi ~/.Xdefaults

XTerm*font:     10x20
XTerm*background:       Black
XTerm*foreground:       Yellow
XTerm.vtMenu: set-scrollbar

$ xrdb -load ~/.Xdefaults

Kick off a new xterm to see the changes.

Rather than redo what others have covered many times, here’s a link that will be helpful to those unfamiliar with X/Windows resource files. The configuration options are nearly endless. Don’t take too much time tweaking your settings and always make a backup of the file you are editing first. You can easily lose months tweaking.

OpenBox

If you are like me, you want a lite-weight GUI. I’m running LXDE which uses OpenBox under the covers. The right-click menu is connected to /usr/share/lxde/openbox/menu.xml, so some very simple edits there will add applications to the popup menu. I added my core apps with just these lines:

  <item label="Xterm">
    <action name="Execute"><command>xterm -sb</command></action>
  </item>
  <item label="Thunderbird">
    <action name="Execute"><command>thunderbird</command></action>
  </item>
  <item label="Firefox">
    <action name="Execute"><command>firefox</command></action>
  </item>
  <item label="Miro">
    <action name="Execute"><command>miro</command></action>
  </item>
  <item label="KeePassX">
    <action name="Execute"><command>keepassx</command></action>
  </item>

Notice how options can be passed in. To see your updates/changes, just use the Reload Config Files option on the menu. Life is good.