For `tint2`, how do you configure the taskbar to always display what workspace you are on?

Question

I have a Centos-6 machine with multiple openbox desktops configured (8 or 16). I have things running on each desktop.

I wish to have tint2 display always what workspace I am on.

I tried changing the taskbar mode to "multi_desktop" from "single_desktop" but this doesn't display what workspace I am currently on.

For tint2, how do you configure the taskbar to always display what workspace you are on?

Answer 1

The in-a-nutshell, solution:

1. in your Openbox config (or other window manager), assign a name for each desktop (may require Openbox restart)
2. in your tint2rc

.

# enable a text label widget that displays in the tint2 taskbar
taskbar_name = 1
# choose a color for the font that differs from the background 
taskbar_name_font_color = #0005ff 100

---

The longer story:

After reading the tint2 documentation/wiki, I tried doing just taskbar_name = 1 . But I failed to see any label for the desktop.

Fortunately I discovered that there is a tint2conf GUI application that shows all the tint2 config options and allows you to "apply" and "save" your changes to your tint2 config file. I experimented a bunch and eventually found something that worked.

1. make sure each desktop/workspace has a string name
   • in my case, I am using Openbox
   • copy the Openbox config file from the system installed location to $HOME/.config/openbox/rc.xml and navigate the to the xml element named <desktops> where you need to
   • navigate to the <number> and choose a positive value N
   • navigate to the <names> and create a new xml element <name> for each of the N desktops
   • if there is no <name> for each desktop --> then tint2 will get an empty string and display an empty string --> then will be unable to tell what desktop/workspace you are on (i.e. bad)
   • make sure to restart Openbox before messing with tint2
2. edit the tint2 config
   • when tint2 starts it copies the tint2rc config file to your user's home at location: $HOME/.config/tint2/tint2rc
   • edit the tint2rc --> navigate to the section starting with the comment # Taskbar --> make sure the following key/value pairs are in the config

.

taskbar_name = 1
taskbar_name_font_color = #0005ff 100

• restart tint2 (I killed the tint2 process then started it again in the background with nohup)
• verify visually you can see the name of the desktop you are on
• done

The reason I failed initially was because I only enabled the taskbar_name and the default font color was the same as the background --> so I couldn't see the text.

Once I picked a color, red in this example, that was different from the background I was able to see the desktop name.