Recently I've come to appreciate Orage's dynamic icon, which shows the current date and month in a very compact and discernible way. One thing that I feel is unnecessary in this icon is the "Orage" string. The icon is particular enough not to be confounded with anything else (I think), and "Orage" takes unnecessary space. It would be much better if "##" would be slightly elevated, the spacing between "##" and "date" increased, and the "month" font increased. This should render the icon more readable and more useful in its purpose: quickly displaying the current date. Would it be difficult to implement such a change? What do you think?
There should not be Orage string anymore in 4.8. Do you really stil see it? paste $orage -v please.
liviu@liv-laptop:~$ orage -v This is orage version 4.8.0 Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Compiled against GTK+-2.22.0, using GTK+-2.22.0. Using DBUS for import. Using libnotify. Using automatic archiving. Using operating system package libical. You're right: 'orage' is gone, and instead it displays the weekday. But I must admit that it is not very helpful. I set my panel to 50 pixels, took a screenshot and zoomed in to 300% to be able to read the 'tuesday' on top of '15' (today). Otherwise it's just garbled something on my screen. Although it would be nice to have the weekday, I don't think that there's enough space in the icon. Wouldn't it be better to keep the day nr and the month, and render the latter bigger?
That probably depends. For me it becomes clear after my panel is 30 pixels. I almost made it configurable once. Let me check.... Is it good in help->About ?
My panel is at 34 pixels, and both 'weekday' and 'month' are visually garbled (although 'month' is easier to guess, while 'weekday' is pretty much cryptic) on both my laptop screen and on the external flatscreen. In help->About the icon is very clear. But as far as I'm concerned there isn't enough space on the panel icon for both 'weekday' and 'month' and I'd prefer disabling the 'weekday' part.
This is now implemented in Orage 4.8.1.5 available in git. After starting this version of Orage, make a change to parameters so that Orage rewrites the parameter file and puts example there. You can ithen define your own status icon by manually editing orage config file (~/.config/orage/oragerc). First you need to set: Use own dynamic icon=true So that Orage starts using parameterized icon instead of standard dynamic icon. (You need to have also Use dynamic icon=true). After that you can change the background picture and the three text rows that Orage shows in the status icon. Parameters are: Own icon file=/usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/160x160/apps/orage.xpm /* This must point to an existing 160x160 xpm type file. There are 3 examples available to start with. You can use for example gimp to modify and create new pictures. */ Own icon row1 data=%a /* Data element to use on the line. By making it empty, you can omit the parameter totally. Man strftime describes what is possible. */ Own icon row1 color=blue /* Several colors are understood */ Own icon row1 font=Ariel 24 /* Font needs to exist in the system, Orage does not check it */ Own icon row1 x=0 /* Orage puts each text in the middle of the row, but as this is not always easy, you can move the text by x pixels with this parameter. Negative values move it to the left */ Own icon row1 y=0 /* This needs to be used to control the y coordinate as Orage has not defaults and puts all rows startign from 0 */ As this feature is new and involves a lot of manual editing, it is errorprone, so be carefull. Another example is: Use own dynamic icon=true Own icon file=/usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/160x160/apps/orage_ice.xpm Own icon row1 data= Own icon row1 color=black Own icon row1 font=Ariel 24 Own icon row1 x=0 Own icon row1 y=0 Own icon row2 data=%d Own icon row2 color=red Own icon row2 font=Sans bold 72 Own icon row2 x=0 Own icon row2 y=0 Own icon row3 data=%b Own icon row3 color=blue Own icon row3 font=Ariel bold 26 Own icon row3 x=5 Own icon row3 y=110
Available in 4.8.2