Xfce Forum

advice1010

Member

Registered: 2023-02-19

Posts: 162

AppFinder - General and CSS questions

I was wondering if anyone can help me out with some questions I have about AppFinder and also about editing gtk.css file. 
I apologize for the amount of questions but this could be a good reference for other forum users in the future.

Probably will put in requests for some of the items mentioned in this post because many seem like they should be settings, but I think most of these questions will probably require CSS to achieve.

1.) Is it possible to hide the bar at bottom containing "Preferences" and "Launch" button?
If not the bar, maybe can the at least hide the buttons (maybe with CSS opaque setting)?

2.) If the bottom bar can be hidden completely, it appears that Preferences (Settings) are built into the application itself, unlike other XFCE based applications that have a separate command to open settings dialog.
Was wondering is there any way to assign a hotkey to access this settings dialog?
I know "ALT+P" works but if button is gone not sure that it will still work?

3.) Way to hide application descriptions and just show application name centered vertically with the center of the icon to its left?

4.) Font sizes
Way to change application name font size?
Way to change category name font size?
I tried these two and neither worked
#XfceAppfinderWindow { font-size: 24pt }
.XfceAppfinderWindow { font-size: 24pt }
(I plan on making a separate post about this because I still cannot seem to understand GTK Inspector.)

5.) Way to turn off mouse cursor hover over application label tags?
Probably tied to an overall XFCE setting, but ideally would like to achieve this just in AppFinder.

6.) Probably not going to show categories, but when I do, is there a reason/fix for why most of the categories show double entries?

7.) When first opened there is a magnifying glass icon to the left of the search field.
As you navigate this then changes to application icons.
This is really for AppFinder in collapsed mode, does not really make sense in expanded mode.
Would be nice for the magnifying glass to remain when in expanded mode.
I read post where user requested to remove this icon and the compromise was the developer mentioned he added way to do this using CSS.
Unfortunate that this will remove the icon from collapsed mode as well, but I am interested in trying this.
Does anyone know the CSS code for this?

8.) What does the context menu item `Add to Bookmarks` do?

Thank you to anyone who reads this and for any information anyone is willing to share

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,315

Re: AppFinder - General and CSS questions

The biggest challenge that you will face with xfce4-appfinder is that it doesn't have any custom CSS style classes defined so its impossible to target just this application. Any changes you make to the css may affect other programs who have a similar widget layout. It might be worthwhile asking the developers to create at least a main CSS ID or style class for this application.

1.) Is it possible to hide the bar at bottom containing "Preferences" and "Launch" button?

window box box:nth-child(3) {opacity: 0; margin: -20px}

2.) If the bottom bar can be hidden completely, it appears that Preferences (Settings) are built into the application itself, unlike other XFCE based applications that have a separate command to open settings dialog.
Was wondering is there any way to assign a hotkey to access this settings dialog?
I know "ALT+P" works but if button is gone not sure that it will still work?

Correct, there is no other way to open the Preferences dialog. However, if using the code above, the preferences button is still there just hidden. Click in the spot where it should be will still open it.

3.) Way to hide application descriptions and just show application name centered vertically with the center of the icon to its left?

In Preferences, check both "View items as icons" and "Text beside icons".

4.) Font sizes
Way to change application name font size?
Way to change category name font size?

window>box>paned>.frame:nth-child(3) {background-color: red; font-size: 14pt}
window>box>paned>.frame:nth-child(1) {background-color: red; font-size: 20pt}

5.) Way to turn off mouse cursor hover over application label tags?

Not possible to do this for just xfce4-appfinder - would need a specific preference setting for this.

6.) Probably not going to show categories, but when I do, is there a reason/fix for why most of the categories show double entries?

Do you mean the category name appears doubled? Does it also happen in whiskermenu or the applicationsmenu plugin?

I read post where user requested to remove this icon and the compromise was the developer mentioned he added way to do this using CSS.
Unfortunate that this will remove the icon from collapsed mode as well, but I am interested in trying this.
Does anyone know the CSS code for this?

.application-icon {-gtk-icon-transform: scale(0);}
window>box>box>entry {margin-left: -50px}

8.) What does the context menu item `Add to Bookmarks` do?

Adds the entry to a "Bookmarks" category.

Again, the biggest challenge is that these may affect other apps on your system because xfce4-appfinder does not have its own CSS ID or style class.

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advice1010

Member

Registered: 2023-02-19

Posts: 162

Re: AppFinder - General and CSS questions

@ToZ / Any users interested
Wow thank you for taking the time to answer these questions.
Seems like this application might not be as far along as I was expecting/hoping for, especially with CSS.
Being that the two applications seem similar, would have been nice if the code for this application could have also benefited from the coding added to create Whisker.
I am going to take the suggestion you mentioned about notifying developers about CSS but just to let anyone interested in the topic know, I have already made some other posts and have been told that the developer does not have time to work on them, so even if I do mention this, it does not sound like this would be added any time soon.

I was able to test out these answers.
Unfortunately with the results I experienced I am not sure yet if I am going to be able to use this application personally, but I will share my results because I think this could be a nice reference post that might be helpful to other users in the future.

What ToZ mentioned about CSS to me would be a concern.
Just note that in these tests I did not look around and see if any other applications/widgets were effected by these settings.

1.) Bottom Bar
This actually works well, it removes the bottom bar.
(Again not sure if this removes bottom bars in other applications that might not be desired)

2.) Preferences Access
Correct you can still click in little blank border spot in bottom left corner to access the Preferences button.  I tried ALT+P hotkey and this also still works.

3.) Hide Application Descriptions
(This was one of the items I mentioned to developer)
I had already tried this but when I did the applications show up in multiple columns.  Have to narrow the window width to get it to go down to one column, but then cannot have a wide width and also the cursor/highlights end up appearing shorter (not full width of window).

4.) Font Sizes
These worked but had some mixed results depending on if Categories are hidden or not.

5.) Hover Label Tags
So this is not possible.  Do not think developer will interested in adding a setting for this but I might mention.

6.) Double Categories
(I mentioned this to developer and he did not experience this)
For me this does not happen in Whisker or Application Menu plugins only AppFinder.  For me I think all categories show up twice ("System" category only one that does not).
Accessories
Accessories
Settings
Settings

7.) Hide Icon To The Left Of Field
This works, I think this looks nice.
I would probably not really use collapsed mode but for any other users who do, just be aware that if you do this then these icons also no longer appear in collapsed mode, which was a benefit for having these icons visible.

8.) Add To Bookmarks
I discovered this shortly after I made this post
When looking through the config folder I found the txt file for this and that is when it hit me, I have Categories turned off and there is a Bookmarks folder.
I look at Bookmarks terminology for applications like Thunar, I am used to Whisker which uses the term "Favorites".
Before finding this out, I kept trying this in hopes that it was the ability to pin applications to the top of application pane list.
There is a recent application setting that kind of does this but if you happen to launch a rarely used application, it adds to the top of list with no way to remove it, so not the same as setting I was hoping for.

#.) Searches
Was not mentioned here but the fuzzy search field also seems to search through many different items to generate results, which can sometimes lead extra results that are not desired.

I had so many suggestions to post about this application but if developers not interested / do not have time then probably not worth mentioning.  Also being Debian based would not even be able to benefit from these updates for a couple of years

Hopefully this will be useful to someone in the future.
Thank you again ToZ for all this great information shared.