Desktop is the new desktop user interface of Metview written entirely in Qt. It is meant to replace the current user interface (called MetviewUI) later this year.
| The minimum recommended Metview version to run Desktop is 4.4.6. |
You need to start Metview with the -desktop flag. At ECMWF the command to use is as follows: metview4_new -desktop Outside ECMWF you need to use your local metview command. |
MetviewUI stores icon positions and types in hidden files (dot files). There is one such file for each icon. In Desktop this information is still stored but there is only one dot file per folder.
A Desktop window is divided into six parts.
Each Metview session defines a home folder (by default it is ~/metview). This folder is set as both the home and root folder for Desktop! This has two implications. First, the home folder icon
in Desktop always refers to the Metview home folder (and not the UNIX home folder)! Second, we cannot directly access files outside this file system from within Desktop (but we need to use symbolic links for these files/folders).
Folders are represented by this icon in the user interface:
To enter a folder double-click, hit enter or right-click Open on the icon. Folders can also be opened in a new tab or window by using the context menu of the Folder icon.
The central part of Desktop can contain multiple tabs each showing a different folder. Folder navigation works for each tab independently.
New tabs can be added by the blue button at the right edge of the tab bar or by using the Ctrl+T keyboard shourtcut.
| On exiting Metview the list of opened tabs are saved! Tabs can also be saved as bookmarks. |
Folder navigation is based on the Back, Forward and Up arrows and on the Breadcrumbs, which are all located in the toolbar.
Each visited folder is added to the folder history, which can be accessed via the History menu (it can store at most 25 folders).
Both breadcrumbs and history items have a context menu, which allows opening the folders in a new tab or window.
There are three folder view modes available:
The view modes can be set to each tab separately through the View menu or using these toolbar icons:
Th statusbar features an icon size slider to change the icon sizes in the current folder (sizes between 16 and 96 pixels are available.
The icon size can also be changed from the View menu or from the Desktop context menu.
View mode and icon size are stored for each folder separately. When a folder is opened for the first time in Desktop these settings are read directly from existing MetviewUI settings. For newly created/opened folders the default view mode and icon size is used, which can be set in the Preferences (available in the Tools menu).
Desktop offers a small set of actions to customise the folder settings.These actions available from the Folder settings tool button (with the "spanner" icon) at the right edge of the statusbar and in the View menu.
These actions are as follows:
Both folders and a tab-sets can be bookmarked. Bookmarks can be accessed either via the Bookmarks menu or the Bookmarks sidebar. You can open the the Bookmarks sidebar with the Bookmarks button in the toolbar, in the View menu or by pressing Ctrl+B.
There are various ways to bookmark a folder. You can use
To bookmark a set of folder tabs you can use:
Bookmark items can be opened in various ways (e.g. in a new tab or in a new window) via their context menu.
Icon drawers are a set of tabs containing icon-strips appearing at the bottom of each Desktop window. Their contents is shared between the Desktop windows (per Metview user). Users are free to customise both the drawer tabs and the icons they store. By dragging an icon from the Icon drawers to the Folder views creates a copy of that icon in the target folder. Similarly by dragging an icon from a Folder view to the Icon drawers adds a copy of this icon to the target drawer.
Please note that Icon drawers can be hidden/shown via the View menu.
On top of using the Icon drawers there are other ways to create new icons in Desktop. The first option is to use the New icon sidebar. You you can open it the via the View menu or with the Ctrl+N shortcut. Its interface shows you all the icons that can be created in Metview. To create a new icon just drag it to one of the Folder views.
The second option to create new icons is to use the Folder view context menu (right-click anywhere in the view when no icons are selected to see this menu):
Here action 'Create new icon' will start up a modeless Create icon dialog, which contains the same interface as the Create icon sidebar. There are two other actions to use: 'Create new folder' and 'Create new macro' directly creates a new Folder or a Macro, respectively.
You can copy icons between Folder views by dragging them with the middle mouse button. Dragging an icon with the left mouse button means move.
The drop target can also be a Folder icon, a Folder tab, a Breadcrumbs item, a Bookmarks item or an Icon drawer. The rules are the same except for the drawers where both the left and middle mouse button drag actions mean copy!
Icons can be copied or moved between folders by using the Copy, Cut and Paste from clipboard actions in the context.
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