Xfce Forum

anon123

Member

Registered: 2017-11-30

Posts: 1

How to make app icons on left-side panel show an "open" status

Hello,

Sorry for the long/vague subject title. I'll try to be as specific and clear as possible.

What I have:
After tinkering around with the panels, what I have so far looks like exactly like this, minus the search for app icon at the very top, above the terminal icon (how do you get that btw?):
http://thelinuxstartup.com/wp-content/u … our_01.png

What I want:
is for the icon to show an arrow, or some sort of highlight, when that app is currently open.

Currently, when I click on an app, instead of showing that arrow like it does here:
http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/im … esktop.jpg

it's showing like this:
http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/ima … 2849-2.jpg

Notice how even though the terminal, and the other two apps, have been selected, the icons at the bottom of the screen do not indicate that they have been selected. Only the very top panel shows that. I don't like this design. The reason is performance related. I can go into details, but I think it's irrelevant.

Can anyone help me configure my xfce left-side panel so that it shows when an app is currently open? Highlighted would be preferred, but the old unity, two-arrows pointing to the app icon would work as well.

Why xfce?
I just installed xfce because I wanted to experiment with a more lightweight desktop. My belief was that the default ubuntu desktop (I checked in my terminal, and it showed that I had unity installed) was the reason why my atom editor was so slow. Please let me know if I'm wrong about this. Since switching to xfce, I've actually noticed an improvement. If anyone has any info about why atom is so slow in general, please let me know. I'm using atom in my ubuntu guest machine via virtualbox. My host is windows 8. Using atom in windows 8 gives me no issues whatsoever, but in ubuntu, it's slow as a turtle, like when you play a game online and there's lag. XFCE, so far, seems to alleviate some of that.

Specs:
Windows 8 Host
Ubuntu Guest, 16.04.3 in Virtualbox
Coding in ruby on rails in ubuntu
Atom editor

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank in advance.

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,492

Re: How to make app icons on left-side panel show an "open" status

Hello and welcome.

minus the search for app icon at the very top, above the terminal icon (how do you get that btw?):

Basically, create a launcher and point it to a program than you want to use. xfdashboard is Xfce's comparable alternative.

What I want:
is for the icon to show an arrow, or some sort of highlight, when that app is currently open.

xfce4-panel doesn't currently have that functionality. Have a look at docky or plank

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