A New E17 Snapshot Before The Big Announcement

A big Enlightenment E17 snapshot was released, days ahead of their big announcement during LinuxCon EU 2012 concerning an official release of the window manager.

For more information on the pending E17 release, see Enlightenment E17 Has Secret Release Plans. Back in July was when E17 release plans began to be formulated and then recently there's been numerous snapshot releases.

For this latest E17 snapshot, revision 77927, the main features include:

- Lots of translation updates
- Support for XCURSOR_PATH
- Speedups to application menu generation
- DND now works properly with ibar
- Desklock background now updates properly when set to use "current wallpaper"
- Shelf autohide fixes
- Startup time improvements when using multiple shelves
- iBox has a new mode for desktop use which allows it to resize based on content size
- Shelf menus now have more items
- Clock gadgets should now update immediately following any timezone change
- Various comp module improvements
- Video previews in filemanager
- Filemanager now has a secure delete option
- Shiny new RandR dialog (not yet complete, be warned!)
- "Slide pointer to newly-focused window" option now also slides pointer when closing a window changes focus
- Fullscreen windows now set and unset focus properly
- Lots of desktop gadget DND improvements to not crashing
- Keyboard layout switching should be more reliable now
- Desklock now supports having its own language and keyboard layout
- Improvements to filemanager basic move/copy support for some corner cases
- Windows will now properly update their iconified status at all times
- Text file previews in filemanager
- Desktop editor no longer opens with a blank desktop if left open when restarting E
- File previews now work better with .desktop files
- Clock popup is now smarter about hiding
- Connman gadget improvements
- Pulseaudio mixer code will no longer sometimes intercept gstreamer function calls
- Moving a gadget from one site to another no longer causes the gadget's config to be lost
- Config option to disable module delays, usually improves startup times
- Module settings dialog is now remembered across restarts
- LD_LIBRARY_PATH is no longer set by E17
- Changing shelf autohide on a vertical shelf no longer causes scrollbars to appear on desktop
- Filemanager now supports DND into pathbar buttons

The noteworthy items from this list include speeding up of the application menu generation, continued drag-n-drop improvements, start-up time improvements when using multiple shelves, video previews in the file manager, a new RandR monitor dialog, improved keyboard layout switching, Connman gadget improvements, PulseAudio improvements, and much more.

Additional details and download links can be found at Enlightenment.org.

Also read E17 Does A Desktop Shootout, The Winner Is.... for an interesting Linux desktop comparison in terms of speed and memory usage.