Bug 396495

Summary: Enhance pager options and visibility
Product: [Plasma] plasmashell Reporter: Eric White <ericsiums>
Component: PagerAssignee: Eike Hein <hein>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE    
Severity: normal CC: nate, plasma-bugs
Priority: NOR    
Version: master   
Target Milestone: 1.0   
Platform: Other   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments: KDE panel comparison 3.5 to 4

Description Eric White 2018-07-14 04:04:41 UTC 
Created attachment 113926 [details]
KDE panel comparison 3.5 to 4

The plasma pager is lacking a few options to make managing desktops easier.  In a previous version of KDE the original pager allowed you to name the desktops and the text was very clearly readable in the pager window and I seem to remeber you could right click on the pager and directly change the name of the desktop.  As of KDE 4 a few things changed to make that made reading the workspace names very difficult.

https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Pager

The first issues is that there is no option to hide window outlines.  At least for me I find window outline information pretty much useless information and it would be very helpful to add an option to hide the window outlines

The second issue is that while you can "Show desktop names" the text is all but unreadable as it's obscured by the window outlines and uses a fixed font, no matter the size of the window.

A primary management tool I use to keep track of what I'm doing is based on these desktop names.  I have 15 desktops with various things going on and have some short text related to whata is going on.  I have to squint to see the names.

Here are some threads with others voicing some frustration over these pager issues and attempting to find workarounds.  I haven't found anything that worked.

https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=140136

Here someone even attempted to modify the sourcecode of the KDE4 pager to make it readable:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.os.linux.suse/ag_uJE29tiM

I'm stuck at work with RHEL6 and KDE4 so I don't really have the time to play with the source code or try to find some way around this but I'm hoping for the future someone can consider making these enhancements.
Comment 1 Eric White 2018-07-14 04:08:16 UTC 
Here's another example of a user struggling with this:

https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=117042
Comment 2 Nate Graham 2018-07-14 14:37:34 UTC 
Sorry, but KDE 4 is unmaintained upstream and has been for almost 3 years. We aren't changing code for KDE 4 software anymore. Bugs against the Plasma 5 pager are actionable though.

Since you're using RHEL which has paid support, I would recommend contacting Red Hat.
Comment 3 Eric White 2018-07-15 00:05:39 UTC 
I was discussing the change as it related to what I observed in plasma 4 but pointing to currently documentation that I assume still applies to plasma 5:

https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Pager

If that is up to date with regards to plasma 5 there is still no option to hide window outlines which should be very easy to add.  Fixing the text font contrast so it's readable despite various theme choices (and maybe scaling might be a little more challenging.
Comment 4 Nate Graham 2018-07-15 01:58:38 UTC 
Those screenshots are old and depict Plasma 4. The Plasma 5 pager has improved text visibility already. The bug tracking the restoration of an option to hide window previews is Bug 392484.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 392484 ***
Comment 5 Eric White 2018-07-15 16:03:59 UTC 
Sounds good - thanks Nate.