[Bug 157400] New: New containment(/More flexibel panel): Add some kind of "quick menu" that could contain widgets which are used often

[Bernd Steinhauser]

------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are the assignee for the bug, or are watching the assignee.
         
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157400         
           Summary: New containment(/More flexibel panel): Add some kind of
                    "quick menu" that could contain widgets which are used
                    often
           Product: plasma
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Compiled Sources
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: wishlist
          Priority: NOR
         Component: general
        AssignedTo: panel-devel kde org
        ReportedBy: linux bernd-steinhauser de


Version:            (using Devel)
Installed from:    Compiled sources

It's really hard to describe this in one sentence, so I'm not very proud of the summary, if you can come up with a better one feel free to modify it (if possible).
I'm also not sure if this is just a way more flexible panel or if that would define a new containment, at least I guess it would share code with the panel.
This is also the reason, why I didn't select the panel component, if you think, that it belongs there, change it. ;-)

Ok, here is the idea:
There could be a containment, that has a few widgets in it, the containment is normally hidden, it pops up if the user hits a shortcut (like the "Super" key or a special button on the mouse). It could either just pop up in the middle of the screen or where the pointer currently it (which means, that it should follow the pointer). It stays there for the time the user holds the key.

Now why would that be helpful?
Lets take "klipper" as an example. klipper has a history functionality, but I almost never used it. The reason is not, that I don't have a use for it, the reason is, that it is in the systray and that is (for reason, that don't really matter here, but there are reasons) on another screen than the screen I'm normally working on. If I would access klipper (by klicking on it and selecting a special clipboard entry) I would have to go over half the current screen and then another one (remember that the pointer most of the time is somewhere in the middle of the screen) and I end up just doing Alt+Tab a few times to reget the paste I wanted.
With the containment described above this would change. You could add a "klipper widget" (which does not exist yet, but I clearly think that that one will be there at some time in the future) which shows a small list (lets say 3-6 history entries dependent on the size of the thing) of the history entries of klipper.
There are other kinds of widgets, that could be very helpful in such a containment (some of them don't exist yet): Floating contacts (I've never seen a point to floatings before I thought about this ;-)), maybe a color chooser, some quick launcher, the pager or even the systray

I don't know if such a thing existed in KDE3, if there is something like that, then I've never seen it, at least. ;)
I also don't know if there is another desktop environment, that has something like that, so I can't just point at another one, saying "That's what I want". ;-)
What I do know is, that some games (mainly ego shooters) have similar elements in their GUIs (I remembered that when I searched for examples.).

I don't know if it's clear what I'm wishing here for, so comments, suggestions, questions are welcome. ;-)
But I do think, that it would help users to work in a more efficient and quicker way.