&Mike.McBride; &Mike.McBride.mail;
&Jost.Schenck; &Jost.Schenck.mail;
2005-02-20
3.4
KDE KControl desktop

## Desktop Behavior

### Desktop Tab

Show icons on desktop

  Uncheck this option if you do not want to have icons on the desktop. Without icons the desktop may be somewhat faster, but you will no longer be able to drag files to the desktop.

  This will not remove any files already stored on the desktop, they will instead be hidden.

  If this is enabled, you may also enable the ability to Allow programs in desktop window.

  Enabling this option allows you to set a program as your desktop background, for example `xearth`, or &kworldclock;

Show tooltips

  Check this option if you would like to see tooltips for icons on the desktop as you hover the mouse over them. These tooltips display information about the file represented by the icon. Depending on the type of file, the information can range from simple file size and creation dates for unfamiliar file types, to complete meta information such as the content of tags for music files.

Menu Bar at Top of Screen:

  This option determines whether there is a menu across the top of the &kde; Desktop similar to the style of &MacOS;.

  The default is None. If you select Desktop menu bar one static menu is shown at the top of the screen, displaying the desktop menu. Finally there is Current application's menu bar (Mac OS-style). If this option is selected, applications won't have their menu bar attached to their own window anymore. Instead, there is one menu bar at the top of the screen which shows the menus of the currently active application. You might recognize this behavior from &MacOS;.

Mouse button actions:

  The mouse button section allows you to determine what happens when you click one of the three mouse buttons on the Desktop (where there is no window).

  Not all mice have three buttons. Two button mice can usually activate the Middle button by pressing both the Left and Right mouse buttons at the same time.

  For each of the three mouse buttons, you can select:

  No Action

    When you use this mouse button, nothing happens.

  Window list menu

    This brings up a submenu with all the virtual desktops. Under each virtual desktop, you can select any window currently located on that desktop. Once selected, &kde; will switch to that desktop, and place the focus on that window.

  Desktop Menu.

    This brings up a submenu with commands specific to &kde;. You can create icons, edit bookmarks, cut and paste, run commands, configure &kde;, arrange icons, lock the session and log out of &kde;. The exact content of the menu varies depending on the current status of &kde;.

  Application Menu

    This brings up the Application Menus (also know as the K Menus), so you can start a new application.

  Custom Menu 1
  Custom Menu 2

    You may also configure up to two custom menus. If you choose either of these, the Edit... becomes available, allowing you to edit the contents of the custom menus.

### File Icons

First are two options regarding the placement of icons:

Automatically line up icons

  If this option is enabled, &kde; will align icons on a grid on the desktop. If it is not enabled, you may drop icons anywhere, and they will not be aligned for you.

Show hidden files

  If this option is enabled, then all hidden files will appear on the desktop. Generally this only clutters your desktop area, but if you are often working with hidden files or folders, this can be useful.

  Be very careful when deleting or modifying hidden files. Many of these files are configuration files and are essential for the correct operation of your computer.

The &kde; desktop has a preview feature for many file types, including HTML files, images, &PostScript; and PDF, sound, web archives (if you have the appropriate &konqueror; plugin installed) and text files.

if you enable previews for one of these, files of that particular file type will not be represented by standard icons on the desktop, but will instead be shown as miniature previews. On slow computers, the previews can take some time to show up, so you might not want to enable this feature.

### Device Icons

On some operating systems (&Linux; and FreeBSD, so far) &kde; can dynamically display icons for each mountable device you have available. This could be &CD-ROM; drives, floppy disk drives, or network shares.

If you enable this, you can choose what kind, if any, of these devices you would like quick access icons to be displayed for.