Bug 492508

Summary:	Hide on hover panel visibility
Product:	[Plasma] plasmashell	Reporter:	Jaak Ristioja <jaak>
Component:	Panel	Assignee:	Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs-null>
Status:	RESOLVED INTENTIONAL
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	nate, niccolo.venerandi
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	6.1.4
Target Milestone:	1.0
Platform:	unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Jaak Ristioja 2024-09-01 17:36:39 UTC

I'm thinking of migrating away from GKrellM and would like to configure a GKrellM-like Plasma panel with System Monitor widgets showing CPU/RAM/SSD/network usage and such, which would be separate from my Windows-style main panel as these widgets would not fit there.

The best alternative I was able to achieve with Plasma 6.1.4 was to configure a fit content floating panel with the necessary widgets which stays on top of other windows. The problem is that I'm not able to interact with windows below the panel, and in contrast to GKrellM it is not possible to move the panel to another place by dragging it. But to be honest, moving GKrellM around quite frequently has also become quite annoying. I wish the panel would always be visible and just hide itself when I hover over it, I only need to interact with it in edit mode.

The alternative visibility options do not suffice. "Auto hide" is hidden by default and only shows when I move the cursor to the edge of the screen, whereas I want the panel to be always visible and only hide on hover. "Dodge windows" and "Always visible" restrict the amount of screen space available to windows.

Please consider adding a new visibility option to hide the panel on hover.


PS: Another use-case for something like this has also been been discussed on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/qtx6u4/hide_panel_on_mouse_hover/

Comment 1 Nate Graham 2024-09-04 04:00:01 UTC

"Hide on hover" would make the panel completely useless for all purposes other than consuming read-only information. It would also complicate entering panel edit mode. So while it's an interesting idea, I don't think we can do this, sorry.

Maybe "Dodge Windows" is the visibility mode for this that would be the least annoying?

Comment 2 Jaak Ristioja 2024-09-04 04:40:48 UTC

Unfortunately it is not a good solution for me, because the panel would then mostly appear hidden because of maximized windows. I want such status information to be mostly visible to help me understand what my computer is doing at any point of time, e.g. whether CPU intensive are not eating my battery or overheating my computer, whether it is some extensive disk I/O (swapping) making things crawling slow or whether my background downloads are not too slow.

It is an explicit intention to have a mostly read-only panel. Something to make interaction simpler might be to disable hiding on mouse enter while a modifier key is held, for example the shift key.

Could you please very briefly clarify the reasons for the rejection: do I understand it correctly that these were more from the UI design perspective rather than a technical one? Thanks! :-)

Comment 3 Nate Graham 2024-09-04 15:36:27 UTC

Hmm, in that case you might be able to mostly get what you want when we implement Bug 158556. That's on the short-to-medium-term to do list.