In Plasma, when the user wants to do some significant layout change in the desktop, such as adding, moving or removing panels or add and manage desktop widgets, will go in the so called “edit mode”, by a context menu entry when driven by mouse, or by long-press in the desktop when driven by touchscreen.
Let me introduce you the improved edit mode workflow Plasma 6.1 will have:
An “edit mode” is necessary because since is an operation potentially destructive, we really want to avoid the user to for instance remove their own taskbar or some similar operation by mistake, during day to day use.
“Modes” in UI are a delicate thing: they have advantage as well many possible problems, which come in when it’s not immediately clear in which mode the user is in, and can try to use the UI as it was “in the other mode” (see https://www.nngroup.com/articles/modes/ as a quick introduction on advantages and disadvantages of modes).
This was a bit of a problem of the edit mode in plasma, as the edit mode was not clearly visually separated with the normal UI workflow of the day to day plasma usage.
Another problem present was that the action buttons of the edit mode toolbar were often hidden away by either the panel configuration window or the add widgets sidebar.
This new mode zooms out the desktop with the same visual effect of the window overview effect (yay for consistency), to well differentiate between normal and edit mode. Using the same zoom effect it puts the whole desktop “out of the way” when either the add widget sidebar of the panel configuration window appear, making sure the whole desktop area is always reachable, applets can be dropped anywhere in the desktop and the edit mode toolbar is always completely accessible.
Good job! It seems much clearer than the current way to configure the desktop. I can’t wait to test it in my laptop. :^)
Will there be an effort to locate widgets that you lost on the desktop and make it easier to know which of a duplicated widget to remove?
omg, this looks awesome!
This is such an improvement, thank you! Plasma continues to get better and better! I’d love to see the virtual desktop animations return, I remember there used to be a way to make it a cube. Hopefully one day again! Thank you for all the work you do, in your own time, for free, it is very much appreciated.
the cube is there in Plasma 6.0, you have to enable it though.
Common plasma W
The position of the “Exit Edit Mode” button implies that “edit mode” only applies to the desktop / wallpaper, so it’s a bit surprising that you can also edit the panel.
Nevertheless, an improvement over the status quo.
This clearly assumes compositing, so what happens on X11 with compositing disabled?
Probably similar to the overview mode effects on X11 with compositing disabled.
(assuming the effects are similar/identical)
that animation is not made trough desktop effects, is completely drawn in the desktop window, so without compositing it works just the same
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