Kicker custom sizing issues

[Richard S. Hall]

Okay, perhaps I am missing something.

I have been using Gnome for a while, but decided to install KDE3 and 
give it a test drive for a while...I am reasonably pleased with it, 
except for one really annoying "feature" that I cannot seem to configure 
the way that I want. It is so annoying that I have to assume that I am 
missing something.

Generally, I place my dockbar/taskbar/kicker (whatever it is called) 
along the left side of my screen with autohide enabled. I then make the 
dockbar reasonably wide (say 100 pixel) so that I can easily see the 
names of windows in the window list...this approach allows me to see 
many more windows in the window list than if the dockbar is along the 
bottom.

To do this, I had to use "custom" sizing for the dockbar and I set it to 
100 pixels. The result is that the dockbar scales up all of the buttons 
on the dockbar (i.e., the KMenu icon) to take up an enormous amount of 
space, so there is no room left for anything else. Further, I added a 
Quick Launcher and it only allows two columns that are spaced at 
opposite sides of the dockbar, instead of doing a reasonable flow layout 
or something, even though there is room for about 4 or 5 columns.

I deleted all icons buttons on the toolbar, except for the KMenu button, 
but it still looks pretty ridiculous, so does the Quick Launcher with 
only two columns spaced far apart. Despite that, it is usable for what I 
want, it just doesn't do the best job of it.

The resulting dockbar looks like this (brace yourself for some ASCII 
graphics):

---------------
|             |
|      K      | <== KMenu button (bad, lots of wasted space)
|             |
|-------------|
| I1       I2 | <== Quick Launcher (bad, lots of wasted space)
| I3       I4 |
|-------------|
| Window 1    |
| Window 2    | <== Window list (good)
| Window 3    |
|-------------|
|      |      |
|-------------| <== Virual desktops (good)
|      |      |
|-------------|
| 12:50 p.m.  | <== Clock (good)
---------------

But what I want is this:

---------------
|      K      | <== Should be only as tall as icon
|-------------|
| I1 I2 I3 I4 | <== Should flow icons into free space.
|-------------|
| Window 1    |
| Window 2    |
| Window 3    | <== Result is free space for window list
|             |
|             |
|             |
|-------------|
|      |      |
|-------------|
|      |      |
|-------------|
| 12:50 p.m.  |
---------------

So, what am I missing?

-> richard

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