Table of Contents

Preferences

This page details all the settings available for the Application Finder. To edit settings, open up the application in it's expanded mode and select Preferences.

General

General Preferences

Behaviour

Remember last selected category
Select this option to make the Application Finder select the last selected category in the expanded view. If this option is disabled, the category All Applications is selected.
Always centre the window
By default, Xfwm4 might position the window in a place that isn't in the centre of the screen (see the section Placement under Window Manager Tweaks to change this behaviour). Select this option to always centre the Application Finder screen on startup, regardless of Window Manager settings.
Keep running instance in the background
Keeps Application Finder running in the background to speed up opening times. You might want to disable this to reduce memory usage.
Single window
This option in only active if Keep running instance in the background is enabled. Only keep one instance of the application open at a time.

Appearance

View items as icons
Select this option to show the applications and commands as icons rather than in a list view.
Text beside icons
This option in only active if View items as icons is enabled. Select this option to position the application name or command beside the icon rather than below.
Item icon size
The size of the icons in the item view.
Hide category pane
Hides the category side pane when in expanded mode.
Category icon size
The size of the category icons in the side pane.

History

Clear Custom Command History
Use this option to remove the history of custom commands you've entered in the collapsed mode that did not match any of the installed application commands.

Custom Actions

You can set custom actions to quickly perform tasks when a certain character or combination of characters is entered in the collapsed view. For example, you can go to a certain article on Wikipedia by typing !w and then the article name.

Custom Actions

Usage

You can add a new (empty) action by clicking on the Add (+) button and remove the selected action by pressing the Delete (x) button. You can edit an existing action by selecting it from the list and using the Type, Pattern and Command fields.

Type
There are two types of pattern matches:
Pattern
Depending on the type selected, it describes the prefix or regular expression.
Command
The command that is executed when the pattern is matched. To include parts of the search in the command the following variables are available:
Prefix
%s - Include the string after the matched pattern. For example, if the prefix-pattern is abc and the entered command is abcdef, %s will be replaced with def.
%S - Include the complete string after the matched pattern. For example, if the prefix-pattern is abc and the entered command is abcdef, %s will be replaced with abcdef.
Regular Expression
During the process of matching, the results of the sub-pattern between parentheses ( ) are recorded for later use. \ plus a number to refers to the corresponding sub-string. For instance, \1 refers to the 1st pair of parentheses' match result, while \2 refers to 2nd pair of parentheses' match result. A special case is \0, which will be replaced with the entire match.
If the pattern is ^ab(.*)fg$ and the entered command abcdefg for example, \1 will be replaced with cde.
Save match in command history
Select this option if you want matches to be saved in the Commands History category.