Config Files
~/.icewm/keys,
~/.icewm/menu, and
~/.icewm/preferences, and
~/.icewm/toolbar, and
~/.icewm/winoptions. The default versions are
installed in /usr/share/icewm/
and will be used if you have not copied them to ~/.icewm.
Configuration Information
If IceWM is the only Window Manager you
want to use, you can start it with an .xinitrc file
in your home folder. Be sure to backup your current
.xinitrc before proceeding.
echo icewm-session > ~/.xinitrc
Now create the IceWM configuration files:
mkdir -pv ~/.icewm &&
cp -v /usr/share/icewm/keys ~/.icewm/keys &&
cp -v /usr/share/icewm/menu ~/.icewm/menu &&
cp -v /usr/share/icewm/preferences ~/.icewm/preferences &&
cp -v /usr/share/icewm/toolbar ~/.icewm/toolbar &&
cp -v /usr/share/icewm/winoptions ~/.icewm/winoptions
You can now edit these files to meet your requirements. In particular,
review the preferences file. You can use
Logout -> Restart-IceWM on the main menu to load
your changed preferences, but changes to the background only take
effect when IceWM is started.
At this point you can either modify the
traditional menu files to suit your requirements,
or use the newer
icewm-menu-fdo described later.
The syntax of the menus is explained in the help files, which you can
access by running help from the menu, but some of
the detail is out of date and the default selections in the menus (a
few old applications on the main menu, everything else on the
Programs menu) will benefit from being updated to
meet your needs. The following examples are provided to encourage you
to think about how you wish to organise your menus. Please note the
following:
If a program listed in the menu has not been installed, it will
not appear when the menu is displayed. Similarly, if the program
exists but the specified icon does not, no icon will be displayed
in the menu.
The icons can be either .xpm or
.png files, and there is no need to specify
the extension. If the icon is located in the "library"
(/usr/share/icewm/icons)
there is no need to specify the path.
Most programs are in sub-menus, and the main menu will always
append entries for
windows, help, settings, logout
at the bottom.
An icon for firefox was copied to
the library directory and given a meaningful name. The icon for
xine is xine.xpm
which was installed to a pixmap directory.
The default toolbar is not altered.
If you wish to use this traditional method, there are more examples in
previous releases of this book (e.g. BLFS-7.8).
Alternatively, you can create a menu which
conforms to the FDO Desktop Menu Specifications, where programs can be
found because they have a .desktop file in the XDG_DATA_HOME or
XDG_DATA_DIR directories. Unlike most windowmanagers,
icewm does not search for programs when the
menu is invoked, so if you take this route you will need to rerun the
following command after installing or removing programs:
icewm-menu-fdo >~/.icewm/menu
If you wish to put icons on your desktop, you will need to install a
program such as Rox-Filer-2.11 which provides a pinboard.
If you do that you will no longer be able to access the menu by
right-clicking on the desktop, you will have to use the
IceWM button. To ensure that the
rox pinboard is running, the following
commands will put it in the startup file:
cat > ~/.icewm/startup << "EOF"
rox -p Default &
EOF &&
chmod +x ~/.icewm/startup
![[Tip]](../images/tip.png)
Tip
There are a number of keyboard shortcuts in
IceWM:
Ctrl + Alt + FN : go to
ttyN.
Ctrl + Alt + N : go to desktop
number N
Ctrl + Alt + Space : open a box on the taskbar where you can
key in the name of an application and run it.
![[Note]](../images/note.png)