After quite a bit of development time I’m happy to announce the next development point release of xfce4-settings in the 4.13 series.

There are many fixes in this release – most visibly also UI improvements. This includes consistent padding/margin etc across all dialogs as well as a restored hover-effect in the Settings Manager. Finally both the advanced (fake panel as indicator for primary displays, re-arranged settings and distinct advanced tab) and the minimal display dialog (new icons, improved strings) received a facelift.

But – despite the nature of the 4.14 cycle – there is also a new feature:

display profiles.

This new feature allows you to store one or more profiles for a particular display configuration that you may be using. In order to uniquely identify single displays we rely on the so-called EDID (Extended Display Identification Data) so a profile becomes a combination of those unique EDIDs. As already mentioned, you can store multiple profiles per setup to cover use-cases like rotating single screens or when enabling/disabling or re-arranging certain screens may be necessary. For instance in office situations where you switch a lot between one or multiple docking stations, projectors and other external devices, this feature will allow you to do so with ease.

Every scenario just has to be configured and saved once.

It is important to note that the list of available profiles is always filtered based on the currently connected displays. To be exact: this means that at least the currently connected displays need to be part of the profile definition for the profile to appear in the list. In turn this also means that if you only have your internal laptop display connected, you will see all profiles because your laptop display will always be part of every profile (even if it is disabled!).

To make the deal a little sweeter I implemented auto-applying of profiles when new displays are connected. This is an optional feature that automatically enables the first – if there are multiple defined for the set of currently connected displays – matching profile.

This action is also triggered if you open the minimal dialog, giving you a shortcut to auto-apply profiles.

What is not yet implemented is profile-awareness for xfsettingsd. So the settings daemon does not automatically enable a profile if you simply start your session, but previously worked in a different display setup. However, this is a point I would like to address in a future release.

In the meantime, enjoy xfce4-settings 4.13.5!