Bug 173949

Agree. Also, some plasmoids seem to be designed to be used only on horizontal panels. Put a battery monitor in a vertical panel and it will be huge! Currently it's necessary to put the battery monitor on the desktop if ones uses a vertical panel.
There must be a way to resize plasmoids in panels. It should also be possible to place plasmoid and icons in columns (for vertical panels) or in rows (for horizontal panels). This would save valuable space on the panels.

A quick search gave me 6 copies of this bug, but I can't mark them as duplicates. It seems a lot of people have this problem.

Duplicates:
bug 168579, bug 182193, bug 183519, bug 167132, bug 187767

This bug does contain elements of many different bugs, and it is not clear which of several distinct issues the OP is requesting. As the OP makes a suggestion for a fix, and another bug specifically requests that same fix, I will mark this as a dupe of that bug, despite having the lower bug number.

Thanks, piemonkey.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 193015 ***

The OP seems fairly clear to me. There are two given issues, and one fix which applies to both. Granted I don't think the OP realized the fix applied to both (cause the kmenu is an icon of a plasmoid), but it does.

Bug 193015 is not a duplicate, because it is clear that "Button Backgrounds" is the feature being requested. There are screen shots that make this very clear. And it makes no mention of having more than one plasmoid per container. However, it is exactly titled for solution to this bug and others. That's how I found this and the rest of the related bugs. I'm replying here cause it seems like a best place.

The issue comes from if one has a vertical panel, the width has to be "large" to make the clock and task manager usable. What this does is make Battery Monitor, Trash, Device Notifier, ... grow in size vertically, taking up more space. If one could put these plasmoids side by side, that would limit them from growing vertically.

The request (or at least the simplest, see kde forums for more general ones) that everyone seems to be edging towards (but doesn't seem to be explicitly stating it) is for a grid containment plasmoid for the panel. Basically you set the number of rows and columns and you drop in the plasmoids you want. Has a quicklauncher feel to it.

This is akin to having multiple rows for a horizontal panel. However, I think this adds more flexibility it the vertical case. Cause the multiple row could cause problems with the task manager plasmoid and then we have the same problem.

Also, if one could put the container plasmoid inside the container plasmoid then vertical panels could be even more space effective. That way I could use the space around the kmenu more effectively.

Bug 168579 comment #3 has an alternate approach which seems to give about the same amount of flexibility (cause one could put in the spacer plasmoid if they wanted), but I think it would have limited use if one wanted to use this idea for a horizontal panel instead. Although I guess in that case if it became a column instead of a row that would work.

This issue can be partly solved by controlling icon sizes, but then one has wasted horizontal space. And it can be partly solved (and has) by putting things like the battery monitor in the system tray. But for the underlying issue to be solved.

Sorry for the length, but I think it was warranted.

(In reply to comment #4)
> Bug 193015 is not a duplicate, because it is clear that "Button Backgrounds" is
> the feature being requested.
I agree, I never really understood why this was marked as a duplicate of that bug. A container there is only for the background color, not arranging plasmoids.

> 
> The issue comes from if one has a vertical panel, the width has to be "large"
> to make the clock and task manager usable. What this does is make Battery
> Monitor, Trash, Device Notifier, ... grow in size vertically, taking up more
> space. If one could put these plasmoids side by side, that would limit them
> from growing vertically.

This is EXACTLY what I've been trying to say with my feature request. 

> The request (or at least the simplest, see kde forums for more general ones)
> that everyone seems to be edging towards (but doesn't seem to be explicitly
> stating it) is for a grid containment plasmoid for the panel. Basically you set
> the number of rows and columns and you drop in the plasmoids you want. Has a
> quicklauncher feel to it.

Yes, a sort of a Grid Plasmoid would solve the problem. One could set the Grid Plasmoid to a specified number of rows/columns with a specified maximum height (for vertical panel) or width (for horizontal panel).

> 
> This issue can be partly solved by controlling icon sizes, but then one has
> wasted horizontal space. And it can be partly solved (and has) by putting
> things like the battery monitor in the system tray. But for the underlying
> issue to be solved.

This look a little weird, but would at least address the main problem: plasmoids becomming huge with the increase of vertical panel width.

Thank you Scott for your reply :) Could someone please reopen this bug as unresolved and not a duplicate?

I agree that this isn't a duplicate of bug 193015 that's complaining about the
panel with the Oxygen theme not looking very good in their opinion.

Although I did flood this bug with a list of possible duplicates (most of which
didn't turn out to be, due to my dismal ability to get people's meaning without
re-reading things 3 times or so. Anyway I digress, I maintain that this is a
dupe of bug 167132

In fact, the second suggestion for a way round this sounds like a general
description of what's being suggested as a fix here.

> 2. Find a way to group plasmoids to enable them to stay small and take up
> less space (a bit like the system tray anyway, I guess).

(In reply to comment #5)
> This is EXACTLY what I've been trying to say with my feature request. 
I figured that, I just figured that it wouldn't be a bad idea to re-enforce it.

> Yes, a sort of a Grid Plasmoid would solve the problem. One could set the Grid
> Plasmoid to a specified number of rows/columns with a specified maximum height
> (for vertical panel) or width (for horizontal panel).
I'll leave it up to the developers to deem the grid or Bug 168579 comment #3 (need a quick way of describing that implementation) is better for coding, flexibility, usability, etc. But yes, a simple grid plasmoid could hold us over.

(In reply to comment #6)
> Although I did flood this bug with a list of possible duplicates (most of which
> didn't turn out to be, due to my dismal ability to get people's meaning without
> re-reading things 3 times or so. Anyway I digress, I maintain that this is a
> dupe of bug 167132
I went through all those bugs and this one seemed to be more of a hub, hence my reply here. Another reason that I didn't post on that bug was that it did list 2 issues, one of which has been solved, so I figured this was a better bug to keep going with. And I even emailed the author of 167132 to let him know about my response here. I couldn't

I'd be ok with either of these being the the "lead" and the other marked a duplicate of it, but my reasoning above stands. Especially since when searching for this issue for some reason I only came up with bug 193015 and not 167132. 

> In fact, the second suggestion for a way round this sounds like a general
> description of what's being suggested as a fix here.
> 
> > 2. Find a way to group plasmoids to enable them to stay small and take up
> > less space (a bit like the system tray anyway, I guess).
No disagreement from me. I just thought I should make it more precise than a one liner.

> I agree, I never really understood why this was marked as a duplicate of that
> bug. A container there is only for the background color, not arranging
> plasmoids.

Actually, that bug has been a proposed fix for the size issue of plasmoids in large panels (like the battery monitor, or the digital clock). If you dispute that duplication, or had any questions, why did you not contact me? That is why our email addresses are present here, not for the spambots!

Considering the consensus of other users who feel this is not a dupe, I am removing the dupe mark. Thanks.

Created attachment 75096 [details]
Look at how the clocks waste half my screen!

all of the widgets should have a sizing hint given to them from the individual widgets common settings.

I suppose this means that any widget (including in Dolphin, the dang preview icon takes a quarter of my screen)
Should be given a do not exceed this size-- In the direction not constrained by the container.

This is a global change that could be applied to all of plasma in one swoop.

Comment on attachment 75096 [details]
Look at how the clocks waste half my screen!

.. and if you put a spacer above the clocks, does that help to effectively squish them down?

Hello!

This feature request was filed for KDE Plasma 4, which reached end-of-support status in August 2015. KDE Plasma 5's desktop shell has been almost completely rewritten for better performance and usability, so it is likely that this feature request is already implemented in Plasma 5, or is no longer applicable.

Accordingly, we hope you understand why we must close this feature request. If the requested feature is still desired but not implemented in KDE Plasma 5.12 or later, please feel free to open a new ticket in the "plasmashell" product after reading https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/Bug_Reporting

If you would like to get involved in KDE's bug triaging effort so that future mass bug closes like this are less likely, please read https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved#Bug_Triaging

Thanks for your understanding!

Nate Graham