Panel Autohide?

[Joakim Andreasson]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 16:53:14 +0100
Jasper Huijsmans <jasper at moongroup.com> wrote:

> 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.

Rox panels has a feature to make them raise when the mouse pointer is on
the edge of the screen, this could perhaps be ported to xfce. Other
alternatives could be to make the panel use focus-follows-mouse by
itself (as an option) or, which is my favourite, make the panel raise on
a predefined key combination. That one is, as of now, one of the few
features I miss from xfce3. Anyway, I believe something like this is a
necessity for people for whom there isn't an alternative to have the
panel stay on top, for resolution/screen space reasons.

 
> 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.

Joakim