[PATCH] panel placement at the center (or whatever) of the screen

[Marco Martin]

On Sunday 30 March 2008, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Sunday 30 March 2008, Marco Martin wrote:
> > This patch allows a different placement for panels with a lenght < of the
> > screen width (or height) to obtain something like this:
> >  http://www.notmart.org/misc/centerpanel.jpg
>
> let's step back for a moment and figure out where this functionality
> belongs, and what it ought to be able to do.
hmm, /me thinks didn't understood very well
> this is something that affects the view more than the containment itself.
> in fact, we've gone to not recording geometry in the placement of
> containments on the canvas at all. it would be nice to keep it that way if
> possible.
hmm, so the position should be saved somewhere else?
and the size also?
> in your patch, there's not chekcing for the panel going off the screen, so
> it would be pretty trivial for the user to end up pushing a panel into
> another view. this would be particularly easy with vertical panels.
the geometry is intersected with screen geometry but there is the problem that 
the width (or height) could become 0, but i really don't know how to avoid 
it, unless there is an hardcoded minimum size.

> the containment needs to stay within the bounds of the screen edge. but
> where it is displayed on that screen edge is really up to the view.
>
> perhaps what we really want is an anchor point and expanding directions in
> PanelView.
>
> this is based on the following use cases:
>

>
> the control UI for this would need to appear in the view itself (at the
> edge closest to the screen middle, or the top edge for floating views), and
> i think we could just use the office icons for these things. drag the
> margin handles, select the justification (those could sit in the middle
> between the margin handles) .. voila.
hmm, appearing outside the panel? should be a window on his own? every time 
the mouse gets over the panel? wouldn't it become annoying?
>
> no moving things on the canvas, natural boundaries enforced for screen
> edges.
>
> so the offset in your patch would become the left margin value, but stored
> in the view. and set up there as well.
ok, so it will still use the applet entry of plasma-appletrc?of course not the 
geometry, so another entry? and what, the view should have his own config 
object? ahhh my head explodes.
also, i really really would like to make the placing work before doing any 
fancy configuration interfaces with panels handles (that probaly needs other 
things before being possible?) that reeeally don't feel like to atm.
i think this patch could work if the placement config plus some other params 
would be read from the proper place and the config interface be the ugly 
current one (but it's from the containment, hmm) or even no config interface 
for now and only readingfrom the config file

Cheers,
Marco Martin