Panel Autohide?

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Hello Erik,

On 17 Mar 2003 22:50:13 +0000
Erik Touve <etouve at earthlink.net> wrote:

> I've read on the list that it looks like autohide of the panel is not
> currently being worked on.  Is this correct?
> 
> The logic for the taskbar supports autohide, and the code is fairly
> straightforward (I've never looked at Gnome C code... I'm more of the
> Windows C++ guy 'currently').  I've wanted to contribute to this
> project, so I'm thinking about looking into support for this.
> 
> My initial thoughts:
> 
> 1) I need 'hide' if autohide is on and the panel doesn't have focus.
> (and I mean focus in terms of mouseover and/or performing actions on
> the panel such as adding/editing/removing items).
> 2) If it does have focus and autohide is enabled 'show'.
> 
> Questions:
> 
> 1) Is it OK for me to look into this?  Is this something you all want
> support for?
> 2) What are some of the problems that I'll probably run into?  I'm
> sure someone here probably has a good idea as to the difficulty of
> this task...  I'm assuming that if it was easy, it would already be
> done. 3) What are the modules I should zero in on?  I'll probably have
> to tie into the same notifications the taskbar uses and adjust its
> size the same way.  
> 

Autohide in the same way as the taskbar is out of the question for the
panel. The panel is based on an entirely different design, most
importantly it is freely moveable around the screen; autohide only works
on a panel that is always on the edge.

The only autohide behaviour that I can think of for a the xfce panel is
to 'collapse' the contents to only show one or two move handles. I'm not
sure if this is useful and/or desirable, but I wouldn't be against it
on principle.

On an implementation note, the logic of hiding is complicated by the
fact that subpanels are separate windows, so the panel will lose focus
when you are accessing a subpanel, but obviously it shouldn't hide.

	Jasper