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Hi often after a reboot my KDE icons end up all over my screen. This is regardless of whether I have the setting to automatically arrange icons set or not.

Ideally therefore I would like my icons to be automatically arranged the way i like them after every reboot. So I was curious what the actual command line instruction was to line up icons vertically in KDE? If I can find this out I intend to make a little script that will do it for me (not that I know yet how to make scripts - or where to put them) each time I reboot and then log back into KDE.

My ultimate goal would be to find a way to automatically line up icons on the left of my screen starting with my home directory first, then system/file icons (such as harddisks, floppies, CDROMs, networked drives) followed by application icons, followed then by all other icons, like files or folders I make myself.

But I guess that would be pretty complicated to achieve. So I would gladly make do with a simple script that I could set to line up my icons vertically after each reboot - even if this meant my icons never really maintained a fixed position on my desktop.

This has always been a major KDE anoyance with me - and I would very much welcome any help I can get to fix it.

Best regards,

GJ

Man this isn't a very active forum, is it?

GJ

Thanks. Yes I probably will make a script. It is just to keep things tidy after a reboot. I find it genuinely frustrating as a user when I reboot to be confronted with a desktop where the icons rarely maintain a specific or logical order. Right clicking is fine - as is selecting to automatically arrange the KDE icons. But the first requires user interaction (which after the 100th time of doing it just isn't any fun) and the second has some quirks of it's own - like icons arranging themselves in an unpredicable - and often non rational way.

I would still prefer the kind of icon arrangement I mentione above - but if line up on reboot is all that is going, I guess I will have to just make do with that.

Thanks again for the input.

GJ

No, I tried making a script, but it didn't work.

GJ

Yes, but auto arrangement still doesn't place the icons in the position I want them. Ideally the solution would be an option that enabled me to right click and 'pin' or 'save' my current icon positions, so that icon positions are preserved, even after a reboot. I like a nice, clean, ordered, structured desktop - and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this desire.

GJ

OK well I got sick to death of this issue of having to chase/rearrange my icons about on my desktop after every reboot, so I decided to try KDE 3.4 to see if this would resolve the issues I was having. Big mistake! Now the situation is much worse than it ever was - as every time I log in my icons look like they have just been spewed any old place. Some are ontop of each other, some are bunched together, some are on opposite sides of the screen. It just seems to make no sense and follow no logical order whatsoever.

Worse still auto arrange icons - which was never so great anyway now has opted to make the horizontal grid spacing huge - and much bigger than the vertical grid spacing so that icons appear lined up on the screen in long lines, rather than in a neat traditional, evenly spaced vertical way. (See following attached screenshot).

I always despised auto arrange anyway (although I would like it if it worked properly) as it tends to aline icons in it's own peculiar order and does not reflect how I would prefer my icons to be lined up. All I want is to set an icon order and have that preserved automatically, no matter how many times I reboot. If I add a new desktop icon, it should just go where I put it and stay there. (Which is what I would call a real 'auto arrange icons - providing the icons stayed within a nice neat/tight grid). If an application adds a desktop icon, it should simply add it to the end of the arragement I have selected. (EG if an application installs an icon on the desktop, it should be automatically placed directly below the last icon on the desktop).

I dug into this as deeply as I could and I found a kdesktoprc file in my home directory (see attached) looking at this, this seems to suggest that it is possible to specify an exeact icon preference order (though if this is supposed to be preseved between reboots I'm not sure of). It looked like it at least resembled the icon order I would prefer, so I decided to try moving it from/etc/kde to /home/~/.kde/share/config and to try overwriting the kdesktoprc file there.

I opened kdecontrol just for good measure and changed the wallpaper on my desktop and then hit save - as I hoped that this would at least help to save my settings. Before restarting KDE I cheched to see if doing this had changed anything. The only thing it did change, as suspected, was my wallpaper.

So I restarted KDE? Result? Complete desktop chaos, with all of my icons again spewed everywhere. I looked at the kdesktoprc file again - and I was somwhat surprised to see that it had been overwritten and that it now looked as follows:

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That's it, that's all there was to it. All other entries had been removed. I tried this 50 different ways over, but the result was always the same. So something is overwiting my kdesktoprc preferences file every time KDE restarts. The question is what and why?

So the outstanding issues I have are, how do I reduce the horizontal icon grid spacing to something more reasonable? How do I get KDE to use the preferences in kdesktoprc that I set and how do I specify a particular order of preference for my icons, that will be preserved even after I reboot?

I would hope the first two of these would have easy simple answers - but the 3rd one appears to be a little more difficult. I can't understand why this is such a big issue in KDE - and such a non issue in say for example Microsoft Windows?

Surely having a logical, consistent and well ordered dektop environment is key to how people percieve and use and assess KDE?

Any input anyone can offer (or better still any scripts, patches or fixes) would be very much appreciated.

Best regards,

GJ

Auto arrange on. Can anyone spot any kind of particular order to this?

And now for auto arrange off. This is what my destop looks like after a typical reboot. Sorry about the images for the 56K folks: