The more obvious way to adjust EDE's behaviour is via the graphical configuration tools (see screenshots below).

The Configuration place can be accessed from the menu in the settings category.

It provides six tools to customize EDE to your liking. These should be pretty self-explanatory.

Here you can change the background colour or set a wallpaper, change icon properties and fonts.

This tool lets you configure a screensaver.

Displays a calendar and a clock.

Provides volume control.

Lets you choose a keyboard layout for your country.

Set your preferred terminal emulator, file manager, browser and mail client.

You can change a lot of settings for EDE which cannot (yet) be set using a graphical configuration utility. So for now you're stuck with editing configuration files in that case.

But that should be no problem, right? At least not when you know what EDE's configuration files are and where they can be found.

Just backup your configuration and start exploring what can be done! We'll cover some common examples later.

By default, EDE comes with a bundled version of pekwm. Configuration files for both are separate.

EDE places configuration files that affect the current user only in the directory ~/.config/ede.

As of version 2.1 you can find the following files there:

• ede-desktop-icons.conf
• ede-keyboard.conf
• ede-panel.conf
• ede-settings.conf

Pekwm's configuration files can be found in ~/.pekwm.

Currently there are the following files there:

• autoproperties
• config
• keys
• menu
• mouse
• start
• vars

Just like the local configuration, the global configuration is also split into that of EDE and of pekwm.

The global configuration files for EDE can be found in the two directories ${prefix}/etc/xdg/ede and ${prefix}/etc/xdg/menus. There you can find the following files:

• ede-conf.conf
• ede-settings.conf
• ede-startup.conf

and

• ede-applications.menu

Global configuration for pekwm can be found in ${prefix}/etc/pekwm. There are files of the same name as in the local configuration directory (which take precedence over the values in the global configuration).

There's one exception, however. One file is only found in the global config directory:

• autoproperties_typerules

Here you'll find some typical examples of custom configuration in a “Q&A”-like style.

This is something that depends on the wm (pekwm by default). You can configure how many workspaces pekwm creates. Simply adjust the file ~/.pekwm/config

Look for the following section:

Screen {
Workspaces = "4"
WorkspacesPerRow = "4"
WorkspaceNames = "Main;Web;E-mail;Music"

Here you can change how many workspaces are available, how many are in one row and what there names are.

No problem. Open up ~/.config/ede/ede-panel.conf with your prefered editor. What you need is the key applets in the category [Panel]. It's not there by default, just copy the following line in:

applets = start_menu, quick_launch, pager, clock, taskbar, keyboard_layout, battery_monitor, cpu_monitor, mem_monitor, system_tray

This will explicitly add all the applets which are the default. Now feel free to delete the ones which you don't like. They will not be displayed when you start EDE next time.

Attention: The order among the applets currently does matter! This is meant to be more flexible in future versions but changing it may break things right now. Just keep it as it is for now.