ALT-scroll zooming

alt-scroll functionality with a touchpad can lead to unwanted zooming behavior if the alt key is pressed while the touchpad gesture is still 'spinning'.

turning off alt-scroll zooming in xfce:

open settings editor
goto xfwm4
zoom_desktop boolean false

to turn off alt-scroll navigation in firefox:

about:config
mousewheel.with_alt.action = 0

Emacs and xfce-terminal

In Xubuntu 24.04, emacs(1), screen(1), and xfce4-terminal(1) seem to have an interaction such that the colors are messed up for emacs under screen.

This doesn't happen under tmux(1).

Setting COLORTERM= seems to fix this (rather than COLORTERM=truecolor that we get by default).

Desktop Emacs Keybindings

under xfce

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Gtk/KeyThemeName -s Emacs

may need to add --create --type string to above

COLORFGBG

some programs like ip(8) look at COLORFGBG to choose their colors. The default may not have enough contrast to show up well (dark blue on black bg) 
  COLORFGBG=fg;bg

  fg and bg are ints from 0 to 15,
  0 is dark and 15 is light

  COLORFGBG="15;0"

  for black bgs

dbus errors with org.freedesktop.portal.desktop.Settings

On Xubuntu 24.04, errors may occur with gui programs looking for dbus keys due to packages not being installed including xdg-desktop-portal and the backends xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, xdg-desktop-portal-xapp, and xdg-desktop-portal-tests.

there also needs to be a file in one of various places like ~/.config/xdg-desktop-portal/portals.conf which contains 

    [preferred]
    default=gtk
A restart of xdg-desktop-portal may be required with systemctl --user restart xdg-desktop-portal

After all that the following should return data: 

    dbus-send --session --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop
    /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop org.freedesktop.portal.Settings.ReadAll
    array:string:"org.freedesktop.appearance"
The backend implementations will return data if they are installed which can be queried 
    dbus-send --session --print-reply  --dest=org.freedesktop.impl.portal.desktop.gtk
    /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Settings.ReadAll
    array:string:"org.freedesktop.appearance"