Plasma and KWin

Software

Those are not radically new features, but rather a refinement of what it was available in KDE Plasma Desktop 4.3

When the mouse cursor is over a task, the corresponding window gets highlighted (dimming all the others), this works for groups too, highlighting the goup’s windows. This was already available in 4.3, but it’s works in a way more reliable way now.

What’s new is that now moving the mouse cursor over the taskbar tooltips triggers the highlight effect too, useful to quickly pick a window from a group, since the thumbnails are now clickable too, activating the proper window.

Another new and very useful feature (even if a bit “hidden”), is seen around the middle of the video: if you click on a task group with Ctrl pressed, it doesn’t open the usual popup menu, but it triggers the present windows effect, giving you a fullscreen chooser of the group windows

Tasks should have text or not? The text in the taskbar is a really important disambiguation, so should always be shown when possible. but in some cases it’s just messy because there is not enough room. so now with vertical tiny taskbars or when there are really many tasks the text is authomatically disabled and enabled as soon as possible.

OGG version

10 thoughts on “Plasma and KWin”

  1. afiestas

    OMG, Ctrl+Click is something I was missing even without know it.
    Would be good if we have something like “Do not show text” in the taskbar, in small screens the taskbar is just not enough 🙁

  4. jospoortvliet

    I’d like to second the request by dass to merge smoothtasks stuff. We had something similair with somebody writing a great enhanced version of the solid plasmoid, then it got rewritten… Maybe code did get shared, that’d be cool.

    I think, as a rule, it should be seen as an opportunity if somebody writes a nicer replacement for a core KDE piece. He/she can easily be lured in permanent KDE development, at least maintenance of that specific functionality, if you offer him/her to get his/her code in as official replacement 😉

  5. panzi

    Looks quite nice. The only thing I really don’t like is that it triggers the window highlight effect when you hover the task in the taskbar. I want this effect only to be activated when you hover the tooltip. That’s how I’ve implemented it in Smooth Tasks.

    @Dass
    I don’t think a merge would be easily possible. While Smooth Tasks is a fork of a fork of the original KDE taskbar, it diverged quite heavily from it. There are still the same concepts in it, but not the same classes. This had the funny side effect that Smooth Tasks never suffered from the wired crashes the original taskbar suffered in KDE 4.3. (I don’t know what where causing them (are they gone?), I just know they never appeared in Smooth Tasks.)

    While the KDE taskbar seems to progress nicely it still handles some cases not as I would it expect to. One I’ve already mentioned. Other than that I think it’s strange that it is not rotated when it is put in a vertical form factor container. Also I really like all my nice little polishes, like nice rtl support or things like when you start hovering a button a highlight effect is drawn on it. When you stop hovering it fades out. In case you move out before it is fully highlighted and back in again before the highlight is completely removed, it does start blending in the highlight from the point it is, and not from zero. It also blends all the different highlight things (“demand attention”, “active”, “normal”, “minimized”, …) in the way. Ok, yes. There are only very few people in the world that mention this (like me). But there is still me. 😛 Oh, also I’ve animated manual task sorting. Had to write a only animated layout for that. And I scroll-animate labels on hover in case they are to short to be
    displayed fully (you can drag the text to manually scroll!).

    I do all this animation stuff manually because there was no good animation framework present when I implemented it. When Qt 4.6 is distributed by Fedora and I find time (not before February or maybe even July) I will look into porting it to kinetic.

    Ok enough about this shameless talking about what I did. For free. Because I wanted it to be implemented. 🙂

  9. Marco Martin

    @jospoortvliet: yes, maybe in 4.5 some of its features could land here too..
    however if they continue to live both, diverge significantly and give a really different user experience is not a bad thing.

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