Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
toncho11 edited this page Jan 11, 2026 · 42 revisions

NXDSKTOP help

Contains details on how to use the nxdsktop dekstop environment and its subprojects such as nxjpeg.

Starting

Check Nano X on ELKS and Troubleshooting

Quick keyboard shortcuts

  • CTRL+A - force closes nxdsktop and Nano X
  • While viewing/editing a text file:
    • CTRL+X - closes an open file in text editor. The editor will propose to save the file.
    • CTRL+W - save file

Editing a file

By default the edit editor is used, but this can be changed to vi for example. In ELKS edit is a clone of Mined editor from Minix. The vi in ELKS is a version of Elvis editor which is clone of vi. Here is a complete list of commands of edit/mined, currently the default editor in nxdsktop.

Viewing images (draft)

There are 3 color modes:

  • 4 color gray
  • 8 color gray
  • 16 color EGA

There are 3 levels of smoothing, level 1 is the default. There are also 2 modes of rendering - per MCU and per band. nxjpeg has a log file /tmp/nxjpeg.log. All the documentation about nxjpeg is in the source file nxjpeg.c. In the file, it is explained that an image need certain adaptation:

convert input.png -resize 400x400\> -colorspace RGB -strip -sampling-factor 1x1 -define jpeg:dct-method=integer -quality 85 -interlace none -depth 8 -type truecolor -compress JPEG output.jpg

So the above command converts a .png image to .jpg, the image size is reduced to 400x400 and the rest of the parameters help with compatibility with the jpg format implemented in nxjpeg.

Limitations

  • You can not use more than one select or message box dialog in the same time
  • All applications and dialogs will be on top of the start menu (can not be improved)
  • Using nxjpeg with 8 gray colors will affect an already rendered jpg image in 16 colors
  • Currently "view .jpg 8 color gray" is unsupported on PC-98

Clone this wiki locally