how to autohide the panel?

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Thursday February 24 2022 03:22:18 hw wrote:

>Having the windows above the panel is useless because it would prevent
>me from using the panel altogether unless I keep moving the windows around
>every time I need to use the panel.

No you don't. Remember this thing called a keyboard, and something called shortcuts? ;) Learn the ones for raising and lowering the window under the mouse cursor (or change them to your liking). "Windows can go over" the panel means they can also go under it.
This does mean you have to set the WM to "focus-follows-mouse" (in KWin you'll probably want to pick the flavour called "Mouse precedence") but given your remarks about fullscreen mode I guess you may already be working in that mode.

You're right that it's not necessarily the desktop notifications which show up in the Notifications widget that cause this. It's something like "window wants to grab your attention", which also causes the window representation in the panel to be marked (and even then there may be a priority hierarchy to this). I get them from my browser for instance, when it opens a new tab: see the screenshots. With "windows can go over", if I simply move my cursor upwards the panel appears and shows the 1st view; when I move the cursor down again it goes back under. If ever it didn't, I'd use my shortcut to bring the window I want to the front.
NB: I may be using the Plasma4 desktop shell, but I use a recent'ish KWin5 so window layering and focus management work the same for me as they do for you.

If KDE's Plasma desktop shell doesn't work for you you can always use a different one that does. Most DEs allow you to use another window manager if you do prefer KWin, for instance.


R
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