Fatdog and Screen Panning tip

[user1111]

In Control Panel, Desktop, Display Properties it indicates my laptops display is eDP and has a 1366x768 display size

In /root/Startup I created a script containing

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xrandr --output eDP --mode 1366x768 --panning 1600x1000 --scale 1.0x1.0

and made it executable, so that on the next restart of X it sets a virtual screen size that is around 20% wider and 30% deeper than the actual display, and I can pan the actual visible screen around that larger area by moving the mouse to the screen edges

I find that if the panning area is too large you can get 'lost', and messages that might normally pop up in the centre of the screen can be outside of the visible area, so a modest 20% x 30% increase is 'comfortable'

If you have the normal desktop layout with the panel at the bottom and drive icons in the bottom left, then that doesn't fit well when using panning. The panel will be placed at the bottom of the visible screen, not the virtual area. So also for the drives, but if you mount/open a drive - then it will be drawn relative to the virtual screen (lower down), leaving some higher up, some down below ... not nice.

So I moved the drive icons to be near the top, and also moved the panel to be down the left hand screen edge ... using Control Panel, Desktop, Fatdog Event Manager to move the drive icons and right clicked the panel and selected Configure Panel to reconfigure the panel.

So now my desktop layout looks like this

s.png (53.04 KiB) Viewed 914 times

But that is a full screen capture, captured using mtpaint -s, my actual display ends at the bottom of the panel and out over to where the save icon is positioned.

A nice feature about panning is that you can better 'scroll' around chrome/whatever. I tend to set the global font size when configuring Fatdog to be a selection that has the chrome title and url bar a nice/comfortable size. With that set I then use the other configuration tools to revise the Qt and GTK font sizes to comfortable levels. But with my ageing eyes that tends to mean relatively large font sizes being used, and also means that for comfortable reading I use chromes Ctrl + and Ctrl - quite a bit on different web pages. With panning enabled as above, that makes reading web pages easier, just moving the mouse to the screen edges to pan across, or two finger sliding on the touchpad to scroll web pages up/down, and/or moving the mouse to the top/bottom of screen to pan up/down.

At times the larger screen area can be a inconvenience such as if watching a full screen movie/video, but you can either resize and position the windowed version to appear to be full screen, or run xrand again to set the pan area size to be the same as the actual screen size.

[rcrsn51]

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[jamesbond]

In pristine Fatdog, if you press Windows key + scroll up your mouse scroll button (Win+scroll-up), a prompt will show up to show the screen in lower resolution (but keep the virtual screen resolution as is).

So if you run wih 1360x768, it will offer you to run the screen at (for example) 640x480 while still keeping the virtual screen resolution at 1360x768. In effect, you're are "zooming" the screen; you access the invisible area of the screen by panning, exactly like what you did, rufwoof - except that you're doing it the other way around (you increase the virtual screen resolution higher while keeping the display screen resolution intact; while this tool will keep the virtual screen resolution but lowering the display screen resolution).

You can restore back to normal screen by pressing Win+scroll down.

This tool has been around since Fatdog64 600 days I think. It will only work for a single display scenario, if you have multiple displays (or multiple screens) it will fall apart, so so don't use it.

[LateAdopter]

Yes it was FD 600. It needed an unofficial patch to the xserver then. Here's one that I did to allow a 1920x1080 video to display unscaled on a 1600x1200 monitor.
Note: I prefer to have margins set, so that I can see what I am going to click on before I get to it. This has 160 pixel margins and only pans horizontally

xrandr --fb 1920x1200 --output DVI-0 --mode 1600x1200 --panning 1920x1200+0+0/1920x0+0+0/160/0/160/0

[user1111]

With the win+scroll-wheel-up on my laptop that's a Win + two finger slide action on the touchpad, and that works well, pops up a dialog and you can select the scale.

For the 'close' of that, win + scrollwheel-down (two fingers on touchpad sliding down) in my case it throws out many dialogs that have to be individually closed. Bit of a bug - that perhaps needs each 'close' (revert) event to kill all former close events (so as to just leave the last).

That's nice for scaling the entire desktop, making everything larger, and having the larger pan area to pan around, but similarly ideally needs the panel (and drive icons) to be on the left/top rather than at the bottom of screen as otherwise in the scaled views its oddly placed/positioned. Perhaps the default Fatdog panel position should be Ubuntu style left screen edge (or at least it was last time I looked at Ubuntu some yeas back now)?

LateAdopter's example does similar to my example, keeps the icons/view the same size, but increases the area you can pan around, so you can scale up the content and pan around individual windows such as using Chrome's Ctrl and + The Win + scrollwheel option in contracts scales up everything.

[mikewalsh]

Jake (SFR)'s 'MagDock' does this nicely, giving a full-width 'window' (of selectable depth, and varying levels of magnification) across the top (or bottom - your choice) of the screen. Works very well indeed. Recommended.

Find it here:-

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 8355729b26


Mike.

[user1111]

Thanks Mike. But its not so much a question of magnify, rather just modest scaling. For example, text in a chrome tab a bit too small, so ctrl and + to scale it up to perhaps 125%, maybe even 150%, but in doing that the horizontal scrollbar kicks in. Could use the standard Chrome shift and scrollwheel (or in my case shift and two finger drag on laptops touchpad) to run the horizontal scroll, just two finger drag for vertical scroll. But with a wider pan area and chrome maximised so the horizontal scrollbar might remain inactive, it all still 'fits', but where you have to pan across that, by moving the mouse to the left or right screen edges - similar to horizontal scroll, but without having to press the shift key and two finger drag across the touchpad - just flipping the mouse from one side to the other screen edges to 'horizontal scroll' (of sorts).

A pan region also means you can fit the visible chrome region to perhaps exclude the title and url regions, along with the Fatdog panel being 'off screen'. More visible real estate space for the chrome content view, but where the panel and title/url bar are just a flip of the mouse away (to the screen edges).

If the standard chrome view just fits the normal visible view region, but maximised fills the entire visible + off-screen region (total pan area), then toggling between the two is just a matter of clicking the normal/maximise button (in between the minimise an close buttons (usually) in the top right corner).

For most other things, I can set a fixed comfortable font size (gtk/qt/openbox (or jwm)) font sizes along with the global font size (Xft.dpi), so scaling isn't required, its already at a comfortable font size level. Some programs however (Puppy scripts/GTK) don't however cater for scaling well and may involve having to use alt-mouse drag and/or looking 'odd' ... again with a pan region its easier to see the whole without having to alt-drag them.

Fundamentally I guess its just primarily a difference of not having to press the shift key as part of also pressing the touchpad to move things into view within Chrome, just flipping the mouse around (touching touchpad) alone.

[jamesbond]

Jake (SFR)'s 'MagDock' does this nicely, giving a full-width 'window' (of selectable depth, and varying levels of magnification) across the top (or bottom - your choice) of the screen. Works very well indeed. Recommended.

Mike, it's excellent indeed and highly recommended. Fatdog even has it included out of the box, thanks to @JakeSFR

@rufwoof, the multiple close windows probably means that sven receives multiple events and launch the same zoom.sh multiple times. It happens to me using the smouse if I scroll the button too many times instead of just once.

Perhaps the default Fatdog panel position should be Ubuntu style left screen edge (or at least it was last time I looked at Ubuntu some yeas back now)?

Well different people have different taste, and nobody seems to have figured about this win+scroll-up "zoom" feature for years (I remember exactly one post in the old forum where one person found about it and it had stopped working back then due to bitrot). So we'll leave it at that, and anyone who want's to play with this is welcome to set the panel to the left side

@LateAdopter, thanks, interesting idea about the border. Yes, we did carry a patch for years before the functionality was finally merged in xorg 1.20.

[step]

Since we mentioned MagDock in Fatdog64, this is the convenience global hotkey I use to toggle the magnifier

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Win+z                  Win+Z screen magnifier, Screen Magnifier Win+z toggle, sh -c "pkill magdock || magdock"

This is for sven. The actual command starts with the "sh -c" bit. This line was dumped with fatdog-shortcut-viewer.sh (also found in Control Panel).