The New Users Guide to Beryl
This guide is intended to give first time users a chance to get comfy with using beryl in their day to day lives. This is not a complete list of every keybindings and option in Beryl, nor is it an install guide. If you have not yet got beryl running, check by the wiki, which has install guides for many different distributions of linux. We will start with general options then move into general plugin usage and finally end with a couple performance tweaks.
General Options
The very first thing a user needs to learn how to do is to open the Beryl Settings Manager either with a terminal ('beryl-settings') or by using beryl-manager and selecting Beryl Settings Manager in its menu. This will open BSM to the general options page. Unless you have a multi-monitor setup, most of the options under "Choices" should be left as default. Under Numeric Values you can set the number of viewports you have by changing the Horizontal Virtual Size. Keybindings to launch commands can also be set in here.
Viewport Navigation
There are several options for navigating viewports in Beryl. The easiest to work with is scrolling your mouse wheel on the desktop. This will cause the cube to rotate. You can also use your keyboard to rotate the cube with Ctrl+Alt+Left/Right Arrow. Or if you wish to view the cube for a bit, Ctrl+Alt+Left Mouse will allow you to manually rotate around the cube using your mouse. These three methods provide the basic ways to navigate around your desktop.
Working With Windows
Shading Windows
There are many things Beryl can do with your windows. In fact, this is one of the primary functions of Beryl. You will find that a lot of Beryl's features already match how you used your desktop before, but a couple new features are present. One of the most useful is the ability to shade windows, or minimize them into their own titlebar. You can do this either by scrolling your mouse wheel on the titlebar (emerald only) or by simply pressing Ctrl+Alt+S to shade the focused window.
Real time window effects are fun and useful...
Setting Transparency, Brightness, and Saturation
It is not terribly difficult to set any of these three settings on any window. To set the opacity of a window, simple use Alt+Scrollwheel, this will increase/decrease the opacity of a window 10% at a time. Ctrl+Scrollwheel can be used to set the saturation of a window and Shift+Scrollwheel set the brightness of a window.
Negative Windows
Negative windows are an inverse image of what you would normally see, white is black, red is kinda blue, and overall the whole thing is often easier on the eyes. To make a single window negative press Super+n or for the whole screen press Super+m. The super key if you are wondering is your "Windows" key.
Moving Windows
I know it sounds like a no brainer, but there are some cool new features for moving windows around. You can of course move windows by dragging the titles bar and they will wobble as they are moved, but you can also hold Alt+Left Mouse and drag windows from any point. Or you can use Super+Numpad to move a window anywhere on your screen. The corners of the numpad correspond to the corners of the screen.
Special Effects
Scale out all your windows to get a thumbnail birds eye view of your desktop...
The Scale Effect
The scale effect organizes your windows in a tiles thumbnail format making it easier to find and pick the one you want. It is one of the most feature packed plugins of Beryl. There are 4 ways to initiate scale. The quickest way is to simply slam your mouse into the top right corner of your screen which will scale all windows from all viewports. You can also do this by pressing F8. F9 can be used to scale all windows on the current viewport, and F7 to scale all windows from a current application on the current viewport, such as all terminal windows. While in scale you can use the right mouse button to zoom in and inspect a window. When you are done right click again to zoom back out. If you middle click on a window while zoomed it will close the application. Icons can also be dragged and dropped via scale using the hot corner initiation method.
The Water Effect
This one is purely for show. Press and hold Ctrl+Super to give your mouse a water trail. You can also start a "raining" effect on your desktop simply by pressing Shift+F9. This effect will not work on video cards without pixel shaders.
The Alt+Tab Switcher
The switcher effect can be started, obviously enough, by pressing Alt+Tab or Alt+Ctrl+Tab to view windows on all viewports. These are live previews you see, so if a movie is playing, you will see it playing in there. The switcher has a variable zoom that can be set in BSM.
Zoom In
You can zoom in on your windows to see whats going on. Hold down the super button and scroll your mouse wheel to zoom in. You can still interact with your windows while zoomed in. One word of caution however, do not play with the settings for input zoom as some of them still have nasty side effects.
Window Decorators
When it comes to this part of Beryl there are three choices. Emerald, Heliodor, and Aquamarine are all available, however chances are you only have Emerald or, Emerald and Heliodor installed. Both decorators work fine, emerald is themed via the emerald theme manage via the beryl-manager icon. Heliodor is themed the same way Metacity themes were set, and Aquamarine is themed just like KWin themes. The point of the decorators is to give you the window borders people are so used to. You can switch window decorators by clicking on the beryl manager (the red gem in your notification area) and going to "Select Window Decorator". Gnome users should use either Emerald or Heliodor while KDE users should use either Emerald or Aquamarine.
Performance Tweaks
Fewer Bits Move Faster
AIGLX users of the i810 driver may find that they get better performance out of Beryl if they set their xservers default depth in their xorg.conf to 16. This will result in some stepping on gradients but is generally acceptable for most everything else.
Broken Frame Limiter
Beryl's internal frame limiter is busted, we know this, stop submitting bug reports about it. However it does cause some performance issues. Some users report that their overall performace goes up if they uncheck "Detect Refresh Rate" in General Options and set the Refresh Rate numerical value to 200.