Manual Hiding of Plasma Panel (desktop shell)

[Emdek]

2010/3/5 Andrzej JR Hunt <andrzej at ahunt.org>:
>> Must it look so similar to old look from KDE3? ;-)
>> In comments to that bug I've written how it could work:
>> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158556#c33
>>
>> Maybe at least these buttons could be shown when moving cursor to edge?
>> Both, for hiding and at least showing panel (to not obscure windows).
>
> Actually, I was myself thinking of making the unhiding button behave somewhat
> the way you described, or possibly just slightly transparent as to provide
> some visibility below it. However this could cause some usability issues:
> when you can see the unhide button (as in kde3), you just have to move the
> mouse over to that panel corner, click, and you're done: one fluid motion
> that takes me half a second. With an autohiding unhide button some more
> thinking is required (Where did I put that panel again?), making it's use
> inefficient --  i.e. I think the unhide button always has to be, at least
> partly, visible.  Having "touch" sensitive unhiding would be interesting to
> try out, I might do some experiments with it, but I think that should be a
> later option, since it is rather complicated (at least for me).

That unhide could reuse unhide from autohiding, less code duplication,
less things to learn for user. ;-)
And if someone decides to use that option the should know how to use
it properly. ;-)
If it there could be added hidden option (to set in file) to switch
between these two ways to unhide then it would be nice enough. ;-)


> I'm not sure about the hiding of the button lengthwise though, since then the
> unhiding button/area has to cover the whole width, takes up more space, or if
> it's completely invisible until you're close by then you're getting the same
> problems as with autohiding, where buttons/panels appear/get in your way when
> you don't need them, and are hard to use when you do need them. I might
> experiment with that once I've got spare time, but at the moment I'm just
> trying to get working manual panel hiding that looks nice and works like it
> has before, without expending too much effort on it.

There was interesting idea to check when to unhide auto hidden panels
(from GNOME :-D), to check cursor acceleration, but this probably
needs many work, but is interesting and could help in avoiding
accidentally showing panels.

>> But if the 'hide' buttons can be implemented so that they don't interfere
>> with the current hot spots, I'm in to have them enabled by default. I liked
>> the idea someone proposed to create those buttons as plasmoids so that each
>> user can decide where to place them (either inside the panel or on the
>> desktop). I'm concerned about the buttons taking the screen or panel edges,
>> and/or displacing or overlapping the panel contents. If this is the
>> behavior of this feature, I'd certainly ask to have an option to disable it
>> completely.
> Don't worry: the feature is completely optional: it is simply an additional
> panel visiblity mode, i.e. instead of selecting "Always Visible", "Windows
> Can Cover" and the like, you select "manually hideable", i.e. the feature
> only appears if the user specifically selects it, and the default panel
> visiblity modes, and their behaviousr, are still the same as ever.

As far as I remember I've proposed that first, to make these button
applets and then for example use DBus to sya: "Plasma, please hide or
unhide panel with is located here ...  or has id ...".
Applet could read id from panel on which it sits or it could be set
manually (imagine applet on desktop that can hide / unhide all panels
with one click).
I really don't like idea of adding fixed things to Plasma, even
toolbox maybe should be available through special applet, then it
would be easier and cleanr to add it anywhere or easy disable. Less
complexity and less code, bigger flexibility. I guess that this is
idea behind Plasma, right? ;-)