Integrating applications into the Desktop

Starting your application with the activate trigger

Your activate object script should start your application when a user double-clicks on your icon with mouse button 1. This script must be named activate.

For example, an activate script to start a graphical clock could be as simple as:

  1 begin
  2 /usr/bin/X11/xclock
  3 finish

If you use a relative pathname in your object scripts, you must be certain that users have the correct path set in their environment. A safer approach is to use an absolute path as shown in the previous example.

To start a character-based application with its icon, the activate script must open a DOS or UNIX (scoterm) window in which to run the application. The following Deskshell object script starts a UNIX editor, vi, in a scoterm window.

  1 begin
  2 shell -t 'Editor' vi
  3 finish

The begin and finish statements cause the displayed icon to change from closed to activated, if you created the appropriate pixmap files.

The shell statement is a Desktop resource that defines the terminal emulation; it is set to scoterm by default. The -t option passes the title to the scoterm window. You can also localize this title and other messages based on the $LANG environment variable.

For more about the UNIX window, see scoterm(XC). For more about the DOS window, see NeTraverse Merge User's Guide.