I dunno. I got a bit bored this morning and played around with e16 some more. I don’t know whether I’ll ever use it enough to go dicking around with menus, especially since it’s actually both faster and easier to just fire up xterm and use that to start whatever I need instead of poking about through menus. For that matter, I can just keep one open in the iconbox. On the plus side, e16 is lighter weight than Gnome, though to be fair, that is in part due to all of the extra stuff I have on my Gnome. Also a plus is that it looks cool–I like that clean appearance–and even without enabling any Compiz at all, I can have menu animation, and I like the way the windows flip and kind of “dive” to the iconbox. It’s a pain in the arse to append -no-desktop to Nautilus every time, and for some reason, using Thunar seems to mess with my desktop wallpaper, but I just installed PCFileman, which I like anyway, and it’s very lightweight. Figuring out why Conky appeared to refuse to start was simple enough…it logically thought I wanted it to show on the first desktop space, but I was on the second. Oops. I might have to adjust .conkyrc for e16, though, since it doesn’t seem to be refreshing correctly. Aha…nope, just had to change the pager’s behaviour. Screenlets work fine, though I’m using only the clock and calendar because when I started all of the ones I use with Gnome, it looked too cluttered. Meh. Dunno. The theme I’m using is okay; can’t say I’m in love with the background, but it’s inoffensive, and I’m sure that adding custom backgrounds is as simple as finding the directory and copying (maybe symlinking would work, too) suitably-sized files from somewhere else. For now, this will do. Sloppy focus is enabled, but I need to find the option to give new windows focus so I don’t even have to click once to start typing in a terminal; that kind of annoys me. It’ll also take time to get used to a left close button.  I guess I’ll have to play with it for a while and see whether I like it as much as Gnome, or not, or perhaps I’ll like them equally. I’m more used to Gnome, of course, but the point of having different WMs and DEs is choice, and WMs like Enlightenment are designed to be user-configurable right from the ground up. Enlightenment (and Blackbox, and Fluxbox, and…) are specifically intended for people who want as much control as reasonably possible over the appearance and behaviour of their WM, and yep, I’d be one of those people. 🙂

Heh. I just had a thought. P. is having some trouble with one of his drop-down menus; it works in IE6, doesn’t work in FF3.1b, doesn’t work in IE8, doesn’t work in the latest stable FF for Windows, but does work in the latest stable FF for Linux (and Opera for Linux, too). Last night, he was using the various browsers on my desktop and laptop, trying to figure out what was wrong, since he’s been using the same code all along and it’s always worked. I don’t think he fixed it, so I’d imagine he’ll be working on it again tonight. I do believe I’ll just leave my desktop session as e16 for now, since Dirty Jobs is on tonight, so I’ll probably be in the living room with my laptop (and iPhone–it’s never far from me!) when he needs to do browser tests. I’ll just tell him to go in and do whatever he needs to do with either of my computers. I know he’ll sit down at my desk, look at the screen with no icons and nothing even remotely resembling a Start Menu (and the only thing that sort of looks like a toolbar is actually just for paging workspaces and it’ll freak him out if he clicks one of the arrows) and won’t have a goddamned clue how to make anything happen, not even a reboot to get him to old familiar XP. It’ll be interesting to see whether he just looks at it, thinks, “WTF?” and walks away without saying anything (in an effort to have me think he did what he needed to do), or whether he asks me to come in and get him to something he’s at least seen before. I won’t even if he does ask, though; I’ll just take control of it from out there with my phone (because I can, and because doing it with another computer would be less impressive). That’s not evil…not my fault he’s got himself convinced that he “doesn’t have time” to learn anything different. It’s not that he doesn’t have time–he has time to watch crappy movies on TV, read badly-written paperback novels, and run college basketball and NASCAR pools, FFS–it’s quite simply that he doesn’t like being in the position where he doesn’t know how to do something, and that’s exactly where he is when you take his Windows away. That’s what makes it funny. Heh.

Ooooh, I just had another thought–Gnome Do. It’s called Gnome Do, but in no way depends upon Gnome, so if I had that running, I’d have all my familiar shortcuts instead of fucking around with e16 keybindings. Hmmmm. Then again, there’s always a potential re-do of Gnome using AWN instead of panels. Not sure…don’t like those huge icons much, and besides, I’m supposed to be doing water changes (half an hour ago!)

Cool! You can take that little scrollbar off the iconbox (hides when not needed), and make the background transparent, and also choose the order in which it chooses the type of icon (snapshot/application icon/Enlightenment icon, in whichever order–I like the little snapshots ’cause they’re cute).