Boards
Creating, naming, moving, resizing, laying out, folding and deleting boards — and what a board stores.
A Board is a transparent container drawn on your desktop holding a group of icons. It has no title bar. All of its controls live in one compact Board widget in the bottom-right corner.
The widget#
[ ▾ ] [ Projects ] [ ◢ ]| Part | What it does |
|---|---|
| ▾ arrow | Folds the board into a compact square, or unfolds it |
| Name block | Drag to move · double-click to rename · right-click for the Board menu |
| Corner grip | Drag to resize |
With outlines hidden the widget is invisible until your pointer enters the board.
Why the controls are in the corner#
A title bar across the top of a board costs about one row of icon height. With six boards on screen that is six rows of desktop given to the tool rather than to your files. The bottom-right cell of an icon grid is usually empty anyway, so putting the controls there costs nothing. This is the single biggest visual difference between DeskDrawer and most desktop organizers, and the reasoning is written up in Why DeskDrawer's boards have no title bar.
Creating and deleting#
Create from the tray menu or the board menu → New board. New boards are numbered (1, 2, 3…) rather than named, deliberately — see Languages.
Delete from the board menu. The board disappears and its icons return to the Default board. No file is deleted, moved or changed. There is no way for deleting a board to lose data, because a board never held your data in the first place — see Board membership.
Moving and resizing#
Drag the name block to move. Drag the Corner grip to resize.
Both snap. Boards align to the Icon grid, to the edges of the Work area, and to each other. Resizing in whole grid steps means a board is never 2.4 icons wide with a ragged strip of dead space on its right edge.
When the Work area changes — the taskbar set to auto-hide, a toolbar docking, a resolution or scaling change — boards that would stick out are pulled back inside it automatically, and the rest stay where they are. That arrived in 1.2.8.
If boards do end up badly placed — after unplugging a monitor, say — the tray menu has Fix misplaced boards, which re-places only the ones that are genuinely off-screen, under the taskbar or overlapping. Correctly placed boards are left alone. It is a rescue, not a reset: contents, names and sizes are never touched.
Rows or columns#
Each board lays its icons out in one of two directions, chosen per board with a pair of buttons in the Board menu:
| Flow | Icons run… | A full board scrolls… |
|---|---|---|
| Fill rows (the default) | left to right, then wrap down | up and down |
| Fill columns | top to bottom, then wrap right | sideways |
The choice changes only how the icons are laid out, never their order — that is the job of Sorting. Boards made before 1.2.9, when this arrived, keep filling rows.
Folding#
The ▾ arrow collapses a board to a small square showing just its name. Nothing is lost — a Folded board keeps every icon assigned to it and unfolds to its previous size. It is the right state for a board you want to keep but rarely open.
Appearance#
Two toggles in the Board menu. Each applies to every board at once, whichever board's menu you use:
- Outline — the thin border around the boards
- Rounded corners — square or rounded
What a board stores#
Its name, its rectangle, its Sort mode and direction, whether it fills rows or columns, whether it is folded (and the size to unfold to), and the list of items assigned to it. All of it in config.json, beside the few settings every board shares — Icon size, outline and rounded corners. Nothing else.