Customization Options

Standard switches

Starting sawfish-ui gives you a lot of options to tweak. Here is an incomplete list of the tweaks:

• Appearance - theming and theme related options
• Bindings - key and mouse binding
• Focus - focus mode options
• Minimizing and Maximizing - mini/maximizing behaviour tweaks
• Miscellaneous
• Move/Resize
• Placement - placement strategy for new windows
• Sound - sound options
• Workspaces - manages the number and the names of workspaces

This list is incomplete, because Sawfish extension can add customization categories. Whenever you see code like this (taken from the animate-move-window extension)

 (defgroup animate-move "Animate move"
   :group move)
 
 (defcustom animate-move-mode 'exp
   "The method of animated moving windows"
   :type (set exp lin)
   :group (move animate-move))
 
 (defcustom animate-move-delay 10
   "Animations rate in milliseconds"
   :type number
   :range (0 . nil)
   :group (move animate-move))

in the code of the extension, you will see the corresponding options in sawfish-ui. With defgroup the extension signals that it wants a seperate customization tab -- here it's a subtab of the Move tab. The defcustom statements define customization switches that show up in the animate-move tab.

Visual customization

Lots of themes can be found at http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/960/.

In general, grab the theme tarball and extract it to ~/.sawfish/themes. The theme tarball should create a directory containing all the code and graphics for your new theme. Verify that ~/.sawfish/<newtheme>/theme.jl is present.

Then you can launch sawfish-ui and select the new theme in the Appearance tab. Some themes define customization options. When you load a theme for the first time via sawfish-ui, the customization options won't show up immediately. The reason is, sawfish-ui grabs the set of customization switches when it starts, and if the theme code hasn't been loaded yet, its switches won't be there. So, if you suspect your theme to be customizable, select the theme and restart sawfish-ui. When there switches they will usually show up in the Appearance tab.