Xfce Forum

Stephen

Member

Registered: 2023-09-28

Posts: 12

Desktop icon spacing problem

Hello everyone. I've just installed the latest MX Linux XFCE and I've faced the problem with desktop icon spacing. I can't find any setting which refers to this parameter. In Linux Mint Cinnamon I could just move the sliders of horizontal and vertical spacing in the desktop settings, but in MX Linux I can't find anything like that. And I still need icons with large font so I'm not going just to set the smaller font size.

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: Desktop icon spacing problem

Hello and welcome.

Xfce doesn't have a graphical tool to adjust icon spacing - you need to tweak the desktop using css overrides. Create the file ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css if it doesn't exist, and add the following to it:

XfdesktopIconView.view {
  -XfdesktopIconView-cell-spacing: 4;
  -XfdesktopIconView-cell-padding: 12;
  -XfdesktopIconView-cell-text-width-proportion: 3.8;
}

...and adjust the values to suit:

• cell-spacing = specifies the spacing (in pixels) between each 'cell' in the grid of icons.

• cell-padding =  sets extra padding (in pixels) placed around each icon+text.

• cell-text-width-proportion = specifies the maximum width of the text label underneath the icon, as a multiplier of the icon width (so for 30px icons, '2.5' would leave a 75px wide area underneath for the text).

To get the icons closer together, you would lower those numbers, to get them spaced further apart, you would increase them.

Note that you need to restart xfdesktop for any change to take effect. So when you make a change to those values, you will need to:

xfdesktop -Q; sleep 1; xfdesktop &

...or simply log out and back in again.

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Stephen

Member

Registered: 2023-09-28

Posts: 12

Re: Desktop icon spacing problem

This works. Thank you.

Last edited by Stephen (2023-09-28 10:41:46)