"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax,
Of cabbages and kings…..”
Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking Glass

Yes, in this OzOS How-To we finally turn our tired but eager minds to the wonders of Enlightenment’s gadgets, modules and shelves (with a hefty helpings of Ibars, Iboxes and pagers).

This is Part 1 of a two-part How-To on getting the most from your e17 gadgets. We will concentrate here on how to set up a new shelf with several gadgets and on configuring both the shelf itself and its gadgets so they work the way you want them to. In Part 2, we'll go a little deeper with our modifications and try some bleeding edge gadget magic.

Let’s first try to sort out this puzzling terminology.

What we are talking about is the suite of Enlightenment tools that can be placed directly on your desktop.

Gadgets and Modules?????

Strictly speaking, there is only one type of Enlightenment visible desktop tool – a “gadget” (I’m not including here single desktop application or file icons). A gadget could be a clock or an application launcher bar (an “Ibar”) or a tool to switch between Virtual Desktops (a “pager”) or any of a number of useful little tools.

A “module” is a package of code that adds functionality to e17. The function of some modules is simply to provide a gadget. You “load” a module, thereby making a particular gadget available to be placed on a desktop (or on a “shelf” that is on the desktop). OzOS comes with a number of “modules” preloaded and others are available to load if you want them. You don’t really need to worry about modules unless you can’t find a particular gadget you want. The terms “gadget” and “module” are often used to describe the same thing but it does help to get their proper meanings clear if you want to really take control of the look of your desktop. This is made even more complicated by the recent release of a module that lets you place any gadget directly on the desktop. The name of this module, believe it or not, is “Gadgets”. So you could say that any gadget is derived from a module (but not all modules are gadgets) and there is a special Gadgets module that is not itself a gadget. Clear as mud! Now would be a good time to lie down for a few minutes, but let us press on.

Some of the most commonly used gadgets already loaded with the default OzOS are:

• Start is an icon that launches the Main menu (handy if the rest of your desktop is covered with windows.)
• Pager is your point-n-click access to your Virtual Desktops - it looks like a row or grid of boxes.
• IBar is an expandable rectangle where you can put icons to launch applications.
• IBox is a similar expandable rectangle for the icons of open but iconised windows.
• "Clock" (strange name!) is a time keeping device.
• Battery is an icon and info window showing life expectancy & time before fully charged for your laptop battery.
• Temperature will give the temperature info from your processor (if supported by your hardware).
• Screenshot is a configurable applet that lets you make an image of your screen (guess how we do the illustrations for these how-tos?).

Gadgets on Shelves

The most common way that gadgets are used is as components of a “shelf”. A shelf is a container in which one or more gadgets can live. Shelves are highly configurable in terms of their location on the desktop, which Virtual Desktop/s they appear on, their appearance and their behavior.

Here’s an example of an OzOS desktop with five shelves, four of them containing just a single gadget and the other a set of seven gadgets (The borders and backgrounds of the five shelves used in this example are invisible, so you only see the gadgets):

Here’s another example – this time a single visible shelf containing several gadgets:

The best way to become familiar with this stuff is to dive straight in. And don't worry if it doesn't turn our quite right or you don't like the result. We have a man called Winston Wolf who will come over to your place, remove the bodies and tidy things up (Not really, you just delete the shelf.)

Custom Build a Shelf for your Desktop

Let's go through building the shelf in the second image above (you can use different gadgets if you like)

First, create your new shelf. On the Main menu select Configuration>Shelves (or Configuration>Configuration Panel and then select "Extensions from the first column and "Shelves" from the second.) Whichever way you do it, you will get the basic shelf dialog:

Adding a shelf is as simple as clicking the "Add" button. Do it.

You will immediately see a new shelf added to the list.

Selecting the new shelf and "Configure" opens the basic shelf configuration dialog. When you create a new shelf, it "inherits" the gadgets from the last shelf created. But, at this stage, we'll deal with configuring the shelf itself, rather than its contents (the gadgets). On the basic shelf configuration dialog, click on "Advanced" so that we can play with all the available options.

In the "Advanced" version of the shelf configuration dialog we will set the position, appearance and behavior of the shelf. Here are some suggested settings:

1. In Layout you select where the shelf will live- horizontal or vertical on a screen edge. For this walkthrough, we will create a shelf in the top-center position. If that doesn't work for you, choose another location.

2. In Size you can determine whether or not the shelf covers the whole edge of the screen or shrinks to fit its contents. In this case we are going to have it full width. The height of the shelf is set in pixels - we'll take 40 but feel free to make yours any size that suits.

3. Under AutoHide you determine whether the shelf is always visible or just pops up when tou hover or click your mouse pointer over the area where it lives. We'll want our shelf to be always visible - but if you want it to auto-hide, you can tweak the timeout and duration settings too.

4.We choose our Style for the shelf from the options available. Most e17 themes provide a few choices (including invisible). On an invisible shelf, the gadgets are still visible (otherwise we'd be in real trouble).

5. The Desktop setting is my personal favorite - this area lets you choose whether to have your new shelf available on all Virtual Desktops or just the one/s you nominate (ctrl+click to select more than one). For this How-To we'll stick with "Show on all Desktops" but feel free to play around with this one - and think about how you might use it customized shelves for particular Virtual Desktops.

6. Apply these settings now before we go any further.

You will now be able to see how the new shelf looks on your desktop. It is now time to configure the contents - click on the button (7) "Configure Contents"

This is a standard e17 two-column dialog - available options on the left and selected options on the right. All we are doing here is selecting which gadgets we want to appear on our new shelf - we'll deal with their appearance and location on the shelf in a moment.

In this example, we have chosen six gadgets - a start button, a pager, an ibar, a clock, a calendar and an ibox. You can add or remove any you want. Here's what we just created:

Our next task is to arrange the gadgets in the order we want them to appear.

Moving gadgets around a shelf is pretty easy. Right click on an empty part of the shelf and select the shelf's name (eg "shelf 2") and then select "Begin Moving/Resizing Items".

Immediately the gadgets on the shelf will change to a glassy appearance with a "handle" in the middle of each item.

Click and drag each item along the shelf to where you want it. When you have each gadget where you want it to stay, right-click an empty area again, select the shelf name and the "Stop Moving/Resizing Items". The gadgets will return to their normal appearance in their new positions.

We'll do one further minor change to the appearance of a gadget - the Ibar launcher in this case. Suppose you don't really like the "inset" appearance of the Ibar gadget and want to change it so that it sits plainly on the shelf(or vice versa). No problem.

Right click on the Ibar gadget:

Select "Appearance" and "Plain". Your gadget now changes appearance.

Here's our "finished" shelf:

A coat of paint and a few pot plants and anyone would think you had a tradesman in!

We have really only scratched the surface of modules, gadgets and shelves with this How-To. In the next installment, we get down and dirty creating different Ibars for different shelves, replacing some standard gadgets with other cool toys and even putting gadgets directly on the desktop.

So, for even more gadget and shelf magic, read on to Part 2