Your first session

In about ten minutes you will find your way around the panel, change how the clock reads, switch the desktop to dark mode and back, and lock the screen. By the end you will know where every setting lives and how changes take effect.

Before you start, install glimpse and start glimpse-session.target. The panel should be along the top of your screen.

Look at the panel

The panel has three zones. On the left are your workspaces and the windows on them, followed by bookmarked places and whatever media is playing. The clock, weather and notifications sit in the middle. The right side holds the tray and the system applets: network, Bluetooth, sound, power and the session menu.

Click the clock. A popover opens with a calendar; once you configure a calendar source under [calendar] it also lists your upcoming events (see Information applets). Click the clock again or anywhere outside the popover to close it.

Now click the speaker icon on the right. You get output and input volume sliders, a row for the current device and a volume slider per app. Scroll on the speaker icon itself and notice that the volume changes without opening anything. Several applets work this way: a click opens the controls, a scroll adjusts the obvious thing.

Open the panel file

The first time glimpse started, it wrote config.toml and panel.toml for you. The clock belongs to the panel, so open panel.toml in your editor:

$EDITOR ~/.config/glimpse/panel.toml

It holds a link to the documentation and nothing else, so the panel runs on its defaults. Every panel setting at its default is listed, commented out, in /usr/share/glimpse/panel.commented.toml. A line that starts with # has no effect.

Change the clock

Find the clock section in /usr/share/glimpse/panel.commented.toml. It starts like this:

# [applets.clock]
# extends = "clock"
# label-format = "%a, %-d %b, %H:%M"

Copy those lines into panel.toml, remove the # from the first and third lines, and change the format to show only the time:

[applets.clock]
# extends = "clock"
label-format = "%H:%M"

Save the file. Look at the panel: the clock now shows only hours and minutes. You didn't restart anything. glimpse watches the file and applies each change when you save.

Put the date back by changing the format to "%a, %-d %b, %H:%M" and saving again. The clock follows within a moment.

Catch a mistake

Change the line to something glimpse cannot read, for example by deleting the closing quote:

label-format = "%H:%M

Save. A notification tells you the configuration has an error, and the panel keeps running with the last version that worked. Ask glimpse what is wrong:

glimpsectl config validate

For a syntax error like this one, it names the file, the line, the column and the problem. Put the quote back and save.

Switch to dark mode

The default [appearance] settings are desktop-color-scheme = "sun" and color-scheme = "dark". With a known location, your desktop turns dark at sunset and light at sunrise, and glimpse stays dark. You can hold your desktop in one mode yourself:

glimpsectl appearance set dark

You need glimpse-settings-daemon and dconf running to change the desktop preference. Apps that follow it turn dark. Your panel follows it through xdg-desktop-portal and a settings backend such as xdg-desktop-portal-gtk; without a running portal, the panel keeps its current look.

Return to your configured desktop policy:

glimpsectl appearance resume

Sunset and sunrise are computed from your location. If glimpse has none, resume fails with no solar phase yet and the desktop keeps the mode you set. Set provider = "manual" with a latitude and longitude under [geolocation], or run GeoClue so glimpse can find your location.

Lock the screen

Run:

loginctl lock-session

This is the standard systemd command for locking a session, so anything that already uses it, such as a key binding or a script, locks glimpse too.

Every monitor shows the lock screen with the time and your name. Type your password and press Enter. The lock screen checks it the same way your login does, then lets you back in.

You can also lock from the session menu at the right end of the panel.

What you learned

You have used the panel's popovers and scroll shortcuts, edited panel.toml and watched the change apply on save, checked the file with glimpsectl config validate, switched modes with glimpsectl appearance, and locked the screen.

From here:

• Use glimpse collects the guides, from arranging the bar to binding keys.
• Troubleshooting helps when something does not work.