[arch-general] I'm having a brain far^Hilure... I can't find the XFCE control

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

It would appear that on Mar 21, bardo did say:

> If you don't want anything on your desktop (including files you put in
> ~/Desktop) just launch xfdesktop-settings, open the "Icons" tab and
> under "Icon type" select "None". There you have it, and you can even
> restore sane permissions on ~/Desktop ;-)

Thank you "bardo"! Trouble is I just tried that and I still get icons for
any files in ~/Desktop.

I was glad to hear the concept (I was using my E17 desktop where it seems
my un-"sane" permissions for ~/Desktop may have been interfering with the
rendering of it's equivalent of what XFCE calls workspaces.

That is until I restored "sane" permissions, the view from the E17 desktop
had a nearly horizontal scratch like stripe where the colors of an adjacent
desktop (workspace) bled through. I was starting to think something was
drastically wrong with E17 (It's not officially stable you know, Hence I like
to have XFCE as a back-up) When I read your reply and said to myself,
"GOOD! That's exactly what I want. 

Anyway I immediately restored the "sane" permissions, noted that my E17
began rendering it's desktop areas cleanly again... Then switched to my 
XFCE desktop to test your suggestion... (Of yeah, since I'd deleted those
links I copied a few .wav files from my music folder to ~/Desktop...)

The desktop has icons for those .wav files... So I popped open the run command
that I've got bound to alt-F2 and typed in "xfdesktop-settings". Which got
me the same settings window as (pop-up menu)->settings->desktop. Then I
selected the "icons" tab and made sure "Icon type" was set to "None".
(Turns out I had already done that...) But in any case I'm still getting
icons.

Icons on my actual desktop kind of bug me for two reasons.

1) I don't believe that I actually think in **pictures. My brain doesn't
  literally have to translate a picture into the proverbial "thousand words" to
  grok it's meaning but it feels like it. To me most icons are just
  meaningless splotches of color. To illustrate this let me tell you I was
  very frustrated when all the weather forecasting sites insisted on
  substituting pictorial representations for the words (clear, sunny, cloudy,
  stormy, rain, snow, etc...) in their 5-day forecast. because now instead of
  being able to grok the whole 5-day thing as a whole, I've got to mentally
  translate that stupid picture into it's meaning before I can grok any one
  days column. ( And for some reason I can't seem to process more than one of
  them at a time so if I really want to grok the week as a whole I open a
  narrow terminal window with an editor running and type the 5 one word
  translations under each picture, then reposition the narrow terminal window
  until it covers the durned iconic pictures with the freshly typed
  translations. Then finally I can think about which day I'd like to schedule
  a picnic...) Result: I HATES icons.

2) My skills with any Rodent based pointing device I've ever tried
  resembles a two year old trying to color inside the lines... I just don't
  have the right motor skills for it. Thus I almost never actualy click on
  an icon... I'd rather type a command. I'm not the best typist either, but
  at least the keys stay put. (& thank God for spellcheckers)...
  
I'll admit that I do better with a trackball or even my laptop's *touchpad
(*once I've disabled all synaptic tapping and scrolling functions that is)
than with a normal mouse. But even with zero acceleration set in the mouse
configuration dialog, I have a hard time using the mouse pointer to
navigate sub-menus... IE using my opera bookmarks for example: If instead
of positioning the pointer the heck out of the way and typing my way to
my bookmark for the Beginers'Guide in the wiki, I tried to get there by
clicking on bookmarks, then selecting the Linux folder which would open
on the right-hand side, then (if I got this far) I'd select the Arch folder
(which would now open on the left side...) The trouble is that each time
I need to slide the pointer sideways to the newly opened subfolder, I have
a better than 50% chance of drifting vertically outside the lines of the
choice that's holding the correct subfolder open. Thus instead of
scrolling down my list of Linux:Arch:wiki-bookmarks I'm just as likely to
suddenly find myself scrolling down my list of Linux:Bash:command-help-bookmarks

**I note however that my brain does process some info from pictures (if the
  resolution is high enough to make it like a real world image) So if, for
  example I can set a different (familiar) picture to each of my desktop
  areas (workspaces) Which I use to group certain tasks. I can use the
  background to quickly see if I'm in the workspace I think I am before I start
  opening applications related to that task-group. I know the kde guys don't
  think people should think this way any-more. But it is how I think none the
  less... 

BTW I don't suppose you know of a way to get a different background image
on each XFCE workspace??? 

-- 
|                                     ---   ---
|     Joe (theWordy) Philbrook        <o>   <o>
|          J(tWdy)P                       ^
|     <<jtwdyp at ttlc.net>>               /---\   "bla bla bla..."
|                                       \___/   "...and bla..."

   At least I know my mouth is running, I just can't find the off button!