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dyfet

Member

From: Cape May

Registered: 2011-05-28

Posts: 13

Website

My xfce panel launcher papercuts

There are several small things that do frustrate me about the current implementation of launcher and launcher menus, so I thought I would share.

The first is a simple issue.  I would love to be able to add an explicit "separator" item to the launch menu item list, that is, which would draw a horizontal separator line.  This would simply make a long list a bit more convenient to visually organize and group.

Also, there is no direct means to control the size of launcher menu icons that I can see.  This was a minor issue for me, because I was creating a launcher that on the panel would open the default browser, and underneath, and have a list of favorite websites to execute by url from "exo-open".  I did this by taking the favicons of the sites and converting them to png.  But the icons draw scaled a little "big" for the menu rather than the size of the png itself.

Doing this also revealed a more interesting problem.  I would like to use the launcher arrow inside the panel icon, to reduce horizontal space.  However, doing this also makes the panel icon open as a generic menu rather than as a tristate when it has a menu.  If the launcher arrow is set outside the panel icon, the panel icon will launch the first launcher item when it is clicked (in this case the browser), but present the menu of remaining items (in this case shortcuts) when held the mouse is held down over it, and that to me is perfect, but having the arrow outside to do this is not so perfect.  In fact, I would be happy with no arrow indication added to the panel icon at all if I can get that behavior with just the panel icon.  My suggestion would be to add an additional item to the "default/north/south/.../Inside Button" list to select this behavior, as I think it is a rather useful one.

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"Information in the computer age is the last genuine free market left on earth except those free markets where indigenous people are still surviving" - Russell Means

Nick

Dev

From: ~

Registered: 2005-02-17

Posts: 1,144

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Re: My xfce panel launcher papercuts

The first is a simple issue.  I would love to be able to add an explicit "separator" item to the launch menu item list, that is, which would draw a horizontal separator line.  This would simply make a long list a bit more convenient to visually organize and group.

That has been proposed before, I've created a bug for it: https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7673

Also, there is no direct means to control the size of launcher menu icons that I can see.  This was a minor issue for me, because I was creating a launcher that on the panel would open the default browser, and underneath, and have a list of favorite websites to execute by url from "exo-open".  I did this by taking the favicons of the sites and converting them to png.  But the icons draw scaled a little "big" for the menu rather than the size of the png itself.

You can do so by editing the ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file: http://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/tr … h=xfce-4.8

Doing this also revealed a more interesting problem.  I would like to use the launcher arrow inside the panel icon, to reduce horizontal space.  However, doing this also makes the panel icon open as a generic menu rather than as a tristate when it has a menu.  If the launcher arrow is set outside the panel icon, the panel icon will launch the first launcher item when it is clicked (in this case the browser), but present the menu of remaining items (in this case shortcuts) when held the mouse is held down over it, and that to me is perfect, but having the arrow outside to do this is not so perfect.  In fact, I would be happy with no arrow indication added to the panel icon at all if I can get that behavior with just the panel icon.  My suggestion would be to add an additional item to the "default/north/south/.../Inside Button" list to select this behavior, as I think it is a rather useful one.

Might be possible, I'm not sure it will work since popping up a menu requires to grab the mouse. Maybe you can report it in the Xfce bug tracker.

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dyfet

Member

From: Cape May

Registered: 2011-05-28

Posts: 13

Website

Re: My xfce panel launcher papercuts

Doing this also revealed a more interesting problem.  I would like to use the launcher arrow inside the panel icon, to reduce horizontal space.  However, doing this also makes the panel icon open as a generic menu rather than as a tristate when it has a menu.  If the launcher arrow is set outside the panel icon, the panel icon will launch the first launcher item when it is clicked (in this case the browser), but present the menu of remaining items (in this case shortcuts) when held the mouse is held down over it, and that to me is perfect, but having the arrow outside to do this is not so perfect.  In fact, I would be happy with no arrow indication added to the panel icon at all if I can get that behavior with just the panel icon.  My suggestion would be to add an additional item to the "default/north/south/.../Inside Button" list to select this behavior, as I think it is a rather useful one.

Might be possible, I'm not sure it will work since popping up a menu requires to grab the mouse. Maybe you can report it in the Xfce bug tracker.

The actual icon and the arrow behave like separate controls in the panel, and if you press on the icon, it separately highlights just the icon, and if it is clicked launches, but if the mouse is held down on the icon, the menu opens from the icon, not from the arrow.  This is different from clicking on the arrow itself, which highlights the arrow separately, and always opens the menu.  So it at least already seems all the logic is there to do this behavior if the arrow indicator were not present at all.  I found a satisfactory solution visually in using separators between panel icons, so that at least the spacing of panel icons such as the application menu, or any panel icons that have no additional menus, now matches the spacing of items that do.  But it does spread out things horizontally more than they should need to be.  It is like what Ubuntu did with spacing of icons in the indicators that doesn't match well or efficiently either...

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"Information in the computer age is the last genuine free market left on earth except those free markets where indigenous people are still surviving" - Russell Means