Nico's blog

Sailfish OS - Tips

This page lists different tips about SailfishOS, mainly for me when I'm looking for stuff, but can be useful for others as well :)

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Disable the animation displayed when waking up device

There's an animation when you wake up your device (Date/time appears at top and moves down, Right arrow appears from edge and moves to left, etc).
Some people find it annoying, so here's a way to disable it:

• install mce-tools,
• as devel-su, enter: mcetool --set-lockscreen-animation=disabled

To bring it back, obviously you'll need: - as devel-su, enter: mcetool --set-lockscreen-animation=enabled

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Enable "Quick App Toggle" gesture

This gestures allows switching directly back-and-forth between apps with the normal horizontal edge swipe gesture, if that swipe is wider than 2/3rds of the screen.

dconf write /desktop/sailfish/experimental/quickAppToggleGesture true

e.g. if you're in the Mail app, then switch to the Phone, if you swipe from the right Edge to the left, and lift your finger at 2/3 of the screen, you will switch back to the Mail app.

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Migrate Notes from older SFOS to 4.0

Tip thanks to user Miklos on the SailfishOS Fan Club Telegram channel!

• Copy the content of /home/nemo/.local/share/jolla-notes/QML into
  • cp -R /home/nemo/.local/share/jolla-notes/QML /home/defaultuser/.local/share/com.jolla/note/QML
• Then set the owner of all files to defaultuser
  • sudo chown -R defaultuser:defaultuser /home/defaultuser/.local/share/com.jolla/note/QML
• Then start Notes app, and enjoy!

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Reduce the keyboard's height

Tip thanks to user Miklos on the SailfishOS Fan Club Telegram channel!

• As devel-su from the terminal,
• Edit the file /usr/share/maliit/plugins/com/jolla/KeyboardGeometry.qml
  • as always, do a cp of the file, just in case!
  • as a reminder, if using vi or vim, you can display the lines number by typing :set number
• line 16, change the 58 value to e.g. 30:
  property int keyHeightLandscape: isLargeScreen ? keyHeightPortrait : 58*verticalScale
• line 17, change the 80 value to e.g. 50:
  property int keyHeightPortrait: 80*verticalScale
• line 38, change the 99 value to 70:
  property int popperHeight: isLargeScreen ? 99*scaleRatio : 120*scaleRatio
• Then restart the keyboard of course.

This will give you this (before and after):

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Reduce the popup time of accented characters

Tip thanks to user Miklos on the SailfishOS Fan Club Telegram channel!

This one allows not to have to wait too long when you want an accented character (by holding e.g. the "e" key on the keyboard):

• As devel-su from the terminal,
• Edit the file /usr/share/maliit/plugins/com/jolla/Popper.qml
  • (as always, do a cp of the file, just in case!)
• Look for the part of the file which contains:

  Timer {
    id: popperExpandTimer
    interval: 500
    onTriggered: {
  

• The value is set to 500 millesconds (half a second),
• Change it to e.g. 200
• Restart the Home Screen (from Settings > Utilites), or reboot your phone for the change to take effect.

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Reduce the remorse timer duration

Tip thanks to user Miklos on the SailfishOS Fan Club Telegram channel!

The remorse timer is the popup window which is displayed at the top of the screen when there's an action happening (e.g. deleting a photo) - it gives you a chance to cancel this action.

With SailfishOS 4, the only available option is to click on the popup to cancel it (whereas in previous versions, you also had a cross on the right hand side of the popup, to carry on - I guess Jolla removed it as it was confusing).

• Edit Feb 17, 2021: user "Mark" on the SFOS Fan Club TG group mentioned that you can swipe (both left to right, and right to left) the poup, which will trigger the action directly without having to wait for the timer to be over.

Some people like to reduce the value of the remorse timer, which by default is set to 4 seconds.

Here's how to do it:

• From the terminal, as devel-su
• First edit the file /usr/lib/qt5/qml/Sailfish/Silica/RemorseItem.qml
  • Look for the line which contains _timeout = timeout === undefined ? 4000 :timeout
  • The value shows 4000, which is in millesconds, so that's 4 seconds
  • Reduce it to your liking, for instance 2000 for 2 seconds
• Then do the same with the file /usr/lib/qt5/qml/Sailfish/Silica/RemorsePopup.qml
  • Search again for the line which contains _timeout = timeout === undefined ? 4000 : timeout
  • And modify it to e.g. 2000

The changes are taken into account right away - enjoy!

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SFOS 4.0.1 Koli: restore Browser bookmarks

When upgrading to Koli, with the new sailjail feature, the browser's bookmarks are no longer there.

To restore them, use the below command through the CLI (SSH or terminal):

cp .local/share/org.sailfishos/sailfish-browser/bookmarks.json .local/share/org.sailfishos/browser/

The command has to be used as default user (so defaultuser since SFOS 3.4, or nemo if you installed SFOS before 3.4).

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Fix broken update

(Used when upgrading from 3.2 to 3.3):

devel-su

mv /var/cache/zypp /var/cache/zypp-old

ln -s /home/.pk-zypp-dist-upgrade-cache /var/cache/zypp

zypper dup

rm /var/cache/zypp

mv /var/cache/zypp-old /var/cache/zypp

reboot

after the restart, finish the upgrade via version:

devel-su

ssu re 3.3.0.14

version --dup

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Deleting alarms

• install timedclient-qt5
• get the list of current reminders with timedclient-qt5 -L
• note the cookie value and delete it with timedclient-qt5 -c <cookie ID>
• or delete everything with timedclient-qt5 --cancel-events
• database is located here: /home/nemo/.timed/events.data

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Taking a screenshot

• Hold Volume + and Volume - at the same time for >1 sec will take a screenshot, which can then be seen in the Gallery app.

Tags: SailfishOS, Tips