a few panel questions

Jasper Huijsmans jasper at xfce.org
Thu Dec 29 16:50:12 CET 2005


Jani Monoses schreef:
> Hello Jasper,
> 
> - The 'Add new item' dialog behaves differently when you add items by
> double-clicking on them and when you select then press the add button.
> In the latter case it closes the dialog, in the former it does not.
> It is probably intentional but I wonder if there's a more consistent way
> to do it. I guess having an explicit close button is too much. It is a
> minor inconsistency but still it is one :)

Dragging from the list also doesn't close the dialog. I originally had a 
  "Add Item" button below the list and a "Close" dialog button. This is 
more consistent, but also fairly ugly ;-)

> 
> - Why are the 'freely movable' and 'full width' options exclusive.
> Having both set could mean one can drag the panel to top/bottom or left
> right only but it will keep stretched. 

I can't think of any situation that this would make sense, really. The 
fixed position panel has much better behavior, because you can click all 
the way up to the screen edge, i.e. there is no border. I don't believe 
switching position will be done very often, so the extra effort to open 
the dialog should not be much of a problem.

> BTW when it is vertical it is
> full height ;) so 'stretch to margins' or other more appropriate wording
> could be used on the option.

I think gnome calls this 'Expand'.

> I think such behaviour is present in the win95 taskbar IIRC, it can be
> snapped to the screen edges.

This is the behavior of the 4.2 panel and I have had lots of trouble 
getting positioning and resizing to work correctly. The new behavior is 
much easier to implement, so I don't really want to change it.

> 
> - Could the panel have a setting to disable confirmation dialog on
> 'plugin remove'?
> 

Hehe, it seems I will be forced to do this, since I get many complaints 
when I remove it. So, maybe ;-)

> - I am missing the possibility of placing plugins in almost arbitrary
> places on the panel. Without the taskbar plugin which I now put in a
> second panel and which used to occupy the middle of the panel with
> seemingly empty area acting as a big separator, the plugins are all
> crowded in one side of the panel. It would be nicer to have them grouped
> as menu and actions on one side and logout, clock sytray on the other.
> The choice of what goes which side is of course a policy and a matter of
> taste but this is a layout which I and no doubt others have got used to.
> Allowing random placement of plugins would allow everybody to arrange
> the panel according to her/his tastes.

The way to do this is to use a separator and set it to expand. This is 
probably not obvious enough...

> 
> - I wonder if the show desktop plugin, being more xfce workspace related
> just like taskbar, iconbox, systray unlike other plugins would not
> be better included with the panel itself?

Perhaps, yes. Anyone else have an opinion on this?

> 
> thank you
> Jani
> 
> PS: I like the new logout dialog :)

Thanks ;-)




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