30. Settings

Settings is where you make the desktop your own: its colours, the size of its text, the picture behind the windows, the names of the workspaces and the Front Panel, how the keyboard, the mouse and the windows behave, the sound of the beep, the resolution of the monitors, the screen saver, the clipboard and what starts at login, and, for the system, the keyring, the updates, the language and the time zone. It grew out of CDE's Style Manager, and it can still look like it (see The compact view below).

Opening it

• Open the Tools drawer of the Front Panel and choose Settings (chapter 22),
• or choose Settings… in the Workspace Menu (right mouse button on the backdrop, chapter 24),
• or type amadeos-settings in a terminal. amadeos-settings mouse opens it at the Mouse page, and so on for every control. The old name amadeos-style still works.

The sidebar

On the left, the controls are grouped by what they set. Click one, or move through them with Up and Down, and its page appears on the right. The line above the page says where you are, for example Appearance › Color.

Group	Control	What it sets	Chapter
Appearance	Color	The colour palette of the desktop and the icon theme	31
	Font	The size of the text	35
	Backdrop	The pattern, picture or colour behind the windows	32
	Workspaces	The names of the four workspaces	37
	Front Panel	The clock and the status cells	37
Input and Sound	Keyboard	Key repeat and key click	33
	Mouse	Left or right hand, double-click speed, acceleration	33
	Beep	Volume, tone and length of the beep	33
Desktop	Display	Resolution, refresh rate, rotation and arrangement of the monitors	39
	Screen	Screen saver and screen lock	34
	Window	How windows get the focus, come to the front and move	35
	Clipboard	The clipboard history, and copies that outlive their program	36
	Startup	Programs and desktop services started at login	35
System	Passwords	The login keyring: lock, unlock, change its password	38
	Updates	Automatic security updates, the updates waiting	38
	Language	The language of the desktop and the time zone	38

The pages of the System group change things for the whole computer or your keyring; some of them ask for the administrator's password on Apply.

Apply and Reset

Each page has two buttons at the bottom:

Button	What it does
Apply	Saves and applies the settings of this page.
Reset	Throws away what you changed on this page since the last Apply, and shows the saved settings again.

You can go to another page before you click Apply; your changes wait on their page until you come back. Closing the window forgets the changes that were not applied.

The line at the bottom of the window says what the last Apply did, for example Palette: CDE Desert (Sand / Amber) or Mouse applied.

The settings are yours alone. Another user of the same computer keeps their own colours and backdrop, and your settings come back at every login.

Finding a setting

Type into the field Find a setting at the top left, or press Ctrl+F first. The page shows the controls that match, and the sidebar dims the others. The search knows more than the names: lock finds Screen, zoom finds Font, left-handed finds Mouse, in the language of the desktop.

Enter opens the first result, Esc clears the search.

The compact view

View → Compact (CDE controls) turns Settings into the row of buttons of CDE's Style Manager. Each button opens its control in a window of its own:

In that window, OK saves, applies and closes; Apply saves and applies and leaves the window open; Cancel closes it without changing anything. View → Sidebar goes back. Settings remembers the view you chose.

File → Exit (Ctrl+Q) closes Settings; Help → About Settings says what it is for.

CDE heritage

CDE's Style Manager, dtstyle, was a row of buttons, each opening a small window. That worked for a handful of controls; amadeOS has more to set, so the sidebar groups them and a search finds them. The compact view keeps the CDE row for those who prefer it.

Under the hood

Settings writes small text files to ~/.config/amadeos/, one per control: theme.conf and icon_theme.conf (Color), font.conf (Font), wallpaper.conf (Backdrop), input.conf (Keyboard, Mouse and Beep), display.conf (Display), screen.conf (Screen), window.conf (Window), clipboard.conf (Clipboard), workspaces.conf (Workspaces), panel.conf (Front Panel), startup.conf (Startup) and locale.conf (Language); the programs started at login are in ~/.config/autostart/; its own view is kept in settings.conf. The desktop and the amadeOS applications watch these files, so a change reaches them at once. Chapter 56 lists all settings files.