Front Panel (CDE)
More info
- Type
- Desktop panel
- Released
- 1993 (CDE), c. 1990 (HP VUE)
- Predecessor
- HP VUE
The wide bar across the bottom of a CDE screen, holding the clock, launchers, trash can and the four workspace buttons: a taskbar in everything but name, years before Windows 95 made the layout universal.
The panel was inherited from HP VUE, where it had existed since about 1990, and it was not a separate program at all: the window manager dtwm drew it. The centre held the workspace switch with its four buttons, a busy light that blinked while an application was starting, and the controls for locking the screen and logging out. Either side carried the clock, calendar, file manager, text editor, mailer, printer, Style Manager, Application Manager, help and trash can. Any control could have a subpanel, a small arrow above it that popped up a column of further icons, and dragging a file or an action out of the file manager onto the subpanel installed it as a launcher of your own.
Everything was defined in text files ending in .fp, the system's under /usr/dt/appconfig/types and the user's in ~/.dt/types, so an administrator could hand an entire company the same panel. The idea of a fixed strip along the bottom with a clock, launchers and buttons for switching desktops went straight into KDE's kpanel and the GNOME panel. Windows 95 arrived at something similar on its own, but anyone sitting at a Solaris or HP-UX box was already used to it.