"Collapse panel" buttons?

[Duncan]

Roberto Ragusa posted on Tue, 10 Sep 2013 10:07:32 +0200 as excerpted:

> is there a way to have small arrow buttons at the end of panels, so to
> manually collapse/uncollapse the panel?
> 
> I remember this feature to be present in KDE 3.

Unfortunately, not that I've found, either native or as a plasmoid from 
kde-look.org, altho I've not checked the latter in a year or so, so it's 
possible someone put one up.

And I looked and looked, because that's one of the remaining missing 
features I sorely miss from kde3, as well. =:^(

Volker K mentioned autohide in the other reply, but it's not the same.
I, and I suppose you, want something that's normally there, preventing 
normal apps from occupying that space, but can be temporarily moved out 
of the way manually when needed.  That's exactly what the kde3 kicker 
buttons provided, but I've yet to find anything approaching that 
functionality on kde4. =:^(

If activities included the panels, then configuring one activity with the 
panel there and another with it missing would work, since it's easy to 
switch activities.  However, activities don't include panels. =:^(

So what have I done to replace that missing functionality?  Well, a 
combination of three or four things, really.

1) For some years I actually killed plasma when I wanted the panel(s) out 
of the way, and restarted it when I wanted them back.  In a way that's 
throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as they say, but it worked, and 
it was a LOT easier than fiddling with the panel settings twice, once to 
turn the panel autohide or set it to apps cover so the apps would go 
above it, and again to set it back to normal docked/always-on-top.

a) kquitapp plasma-desktop (or killall plasma-desktop)

b) Do your thing using krunner/hotkeys/konsole-CLI-launching, all 
independent of plasma so they still work without it.

c) relaunch plasma-desktop (again using krunner/hotkeys/konsole to 
restart plasma).

2) Over time, as the drivers got better with OpenGL and kwin's OpenGL 
zoomer effect worked better, I switched to keeping normal sized apps and 
simply zooming in on them more frequently.  Since I was already using a 
dual-monitor desktop, both full-HD 1920x1080 in stacked config with the 
big system-monitor panel that I wanted always-visible except when I 
specifically wanted it out of the way (the use I made of the panel slide 
buttons in kde3) on the upper monitor, with the lower one thus available 
for maximized or full-screen, zooming in on a vertically maximized half-
size horizontal window until it was covering both monitors became my 
preferred workaround for a time, and it still is to some extent.

3) About a year ago I upgraded monitors, from dual 21-inch full-HD, to 
dual 42-inch full-HD, the latter actually being TVs, using the HDMI 
inputs (with appropriate adapters) from the graphics card.  That didn't 
increase the resolution any, but it DID give me a wall-sized set of 
displays.

Shortly after that, I realized that my graphics card actually had three 
outputs and I still had one of the old 21-inch monitors available, so I 
bought another adapter cable and attached it as well.  It's logically 
stacked on the others but physically off to the side.

That third monitor is where I run the system-monitors now, leaving the 
two big monitors for full-wall work, when I want that.  As such, I don't 
worry about getting that panel out of the way any more, because it's 
already on a physically and logically out of the way monitor of its own.


But I still wish they'd get that simple button back!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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