[Discussion] - Plasma Panels Future Enhancements?

[Michail Vourlakos]

Hello everyone,


I am working in the plasma panels codepage these days, trying to enhance 
their features and I would like your opinion in some aspects of it. This 
effort is based a lot in the Now Dock Panel and its needs. I have sent 
some feature requests and lately I have sent some patches for review. I 
have the opinion that all the future enhancements should go inside 
plasma and kwin instead of keeping all the workarounds outside. I have 
done that mistake in the past :). So I am here and I am willing to work 
on the following but I will need your knowledge and guidance in some of 
them. Of course you are them who are going to decide if this is worth it...


1. Transparent Panels

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368384

https://phabricator.kde.org/D3282

https://phabricator.kde.org/D3283


2. Change Panel's Thickness from client side

As I have understood it, the plasma panels change their thickness only 
by the user setting its value. I would like this to be able to be 
changed from the panel's client qml codepage. I tried to expose 
thickness with Layout.preferredWidth and preferredHeight but this didnt 
go quite well because it breaks current implementatation. I tried 
containment.implicitWidth... but this isnt exposed at all. Do you have 
any ideas how this should be implemented in order to not break current 
implementation?


3. "Real" Panel Transparency

Docks are panels that not only have a visual transparent background but 
also they pass the mouse events to go underneath their transparent 
areas. This is also the way Plank is doing it. It creates a big window 
that for the transparent background leaves all the mouse events go 
underneath. I believe plasma panels are Qt windows managed from KWin, I 
think Qt is offering this feature by setting some flags for the window. 
Do you have any ideas for this?


regards,

michail


P.S. I am willing to work on the above and I am not in any hurry. I 
would like just the above to be offered from our main codepage.


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